Maybe its that I turned 35 this year, and everything conspires to remind me how young I'm not.

The pattern of life seems a perverse kind of going nowhere in which we appear in the passion play fresh and empty as you like. We then spend some number of years learning to be crazy--neurotic in all the ten thousand unimportant little ways. And when you finally top out, you can begin the process of peeling off a neurosis or two, of maturing, learning of life. In the end, if you are very blessed, you arrive at a cozy old age in which you have strained to wisdom. Said wisdom consisting in the fact that you have managed to unlearn most of what you spent the early part of your life taking on. As you age, you come to notice that what seemed once so important now seems so unimportant. You are mildly amused that you could have once thought so much to be of such moment. If the process is permitted to run its course you finish with an empty contentment, unburdened by trappings, and we call this blessed state wisdom. And that, in the best of cases, is the life human.

I used to have a simple faith in the promise of it all, predicated on the implicit belief that everything was future, that everything was possible. Its easy to carry that faith through your 20s; but somewhere in the mid-thirties such matters are not so uncritically assumed. It dawns, one fine morning, like the detail in a scene that was there unnoticed all along, that not everything is future. That some things are most definitely past. That some possibilities are indeed foreclosed. That you have made choices along the way, and that choices matter. Even the little incidental choices move you off along divergent world-lines. Sometimes of course there are choices that are full with difference, and you can sense the existential savor of a choice that obviously matters. The surprise is that they all do.

And how odd it is when the body first begins to announce its determined presence by the little failings that begin to appear. Those annoying unimportant ways in which things swell and sag and run short. In your youth you are privileged to take your body for granted. You don't have to think about your body as such, as separate from your will, from you. You simply will this and that and this and that happen. Later there will be slippage between the will and the appearance of this and that. This is when you notice that your will and your body are not quite the same thing. Odd when you say it, because who would assert the proposition that they were, if asked. But you believe it nonetheless, as you discover only when you discover it isn't true.

There are, sad to say, people to whom these truths come frightfully early. People who suffer some terrific blow of fate; some injury or illness which makes all this only too clear. And maybe that's my trouble. I've been seeing a lot of that lately. Much more than I can cheerfully assimilate.

Like the guy today. It seems he shot himself in the head, quite neatly. The bullet just left a kind of little crease in his forehead, hardly even unpleasant enough to call a scar. It ripped through his left brain leaving the right half of his body paralyzed and lodged in the left visual cortex at the back of the head (where it remains), producing doubled vision in the right eye. A suicide attempt. And a serious and potent one at that. Although fate interposed and allowed only a damaged brain rather than an extinguished life.

Like most damaged brains his exhibited the characteristic but always surprising mosaic of curiously specific islands of absence in the larger sea. We talked for a long time about many things. He could easily remember details and dates. But when I asked him what kind of work he did, suddenly a void. He could not remember his job, although he could tell me he went to a trade school to learn to do this thing, whatever this thing was.

And he was younger than me, born in 1953--lately I seem always to check.

At one point he volunteered that the guy who shot him was so shaken with remorse that upon learning he was still in a coma two months later, this guy killed himself.

Then there was the young woman (born 1957) whose husband shot her half a dozen times, and taking her for dead finished the job on himself. She said he walked up to the car she was sitting in and shot her through the open door. She still has the car, and talked about how she had to have it reupholstered because they couldn't get the blood out of the seat, and in any case the seats were torn irredeemably by the bullets that passed through her body. I wondered why she bothered, as I couldn't imagine ever riding in the car after that.

Being paralyzed from the chest down she can't pee. So there is a large plastic tube stuck in her abdomen through which she leaks into a bag hanging on the side of the bed. I was struck by the quantity her body unthinkingly manufactured in the short time we were together.

She wept as she told me that she had made a mistake earlier that week when she allowed them to bring her four year old to see her. The child was frightened by the sight of her damaged mommy. She thought it would have been better if she had waited until she was stronger; she was burdened with much guilt about the episode, as if she were somehow responsible for it all. I said something lame about children being resilient and she would adapt to it, just to give it time. I hoped it helped. It seemed to, a little.

Seems its been my week for the wreckage left behind by our commitment to owning and bearing arms. One of the lesser Constitutional Rights in my opinion.

So much of my sense of myself has always been bound up with capacity, capacity to be terribly clever and bright, or capacity to always be superior in whatever ways I was pleased to imagine myself to be. Ability. The ability to do, to achieve. What used to be called a typically male sense of self; although lately women have begun demanding their inalienable right to share in this particular disease. And terror for me comes when I lose faith in my abilities. See them declining. I can become quite fragile, and any little setback is just so much irrefutable evidence of my decline. The mood usually passes. The decline is real, the loss of faith optional.

There is one consolation I have noticed with the spreading appearance of middle age. These moods of despair, this loss of faith, runs much less deep. In my youth I was often on the roller-coaster ride of emotional assent and plummet. My depressions, when they came, as frequently they did, were explorations of the bottoms of black, black pits. I could linger in my loss for days on end. Scratching around on hands and knees, bumping my bruised nose against dark walls as I reveled in every crevice and corner of my despair. These days that all seems a lot of performance for very little purpose. In this one respect at least I may lay claim to a measure of wisdom, I suppose.

Now, instead of the black, black pit, a fine gray dust settles on my soul from time to time. Just a light sprinkling. Nothing to occasion much melodrama. And now, as often as not, the dusting comes not from some cloud I have stirred up within myself, but from those images in gray that manage to filter in through the screen of my blithe busyness. It no longer seems always to be about me.