Ten years ago today bathed in a fevered sweat. Ten years ago today my nerves, questionable.

Today I sit next to a girl who epitomizes my supreme self-absorption ten years ago. Maybe that's entirely judgmental. I'm guilty of that on occasion as well. But the difference is that maybe she can get away with it longer than I did. I have just come to see that kind of self-absorption as a lonely place. Kind of like Plato's friends who sit watching the shadows on the wall... Depite what anyone can say about me, anyone who's spent a great deal of time with me over the last ten years knows I am not the same person I was then. The theory about the electrons changing, the cells migrating. Those details are amenable to science. I don't know if I know more than I knew back then. Maybe I do in that I know that I know less than I think I do. Thank you, Confucius.

The goal is to be more humble. Less me. The goal the last five years have been to be less me. Less the type of person that lingers which perhaps need not. It's not the Body Artist. This is not a tale of asceticism. Maybe that works for the Jains or the Opus Dei but not for this cat. I have a low threshold for pain. Ten years of reality, except for dreams. Life is but a dream when you're clean. At least, it can be I've found. I remember waking up one Sunday morning, as I have for a couple years as far back as I can remember and going to a meeting club and there were all my friends sitting in their chairs, some beaming, some reflective, some sleepy-eyed. But they surrounded me.

There was a man I'll never forget as long as I live named Richard Watkins who went to the Sacred Heart Church in North Omaha who gave me a post-it note with the inscription "Isaiah 43:4" on it. Nothing else, no real explanation. But it was there, and why I remember that above all else, I can only explain by my experience over the last ten years in light of that one phrase, "Since thou hast been precious in my sight, and honourable, and I have loved thee; therefore will I give men for thee, and peoples for thy life." I remembered that around 3 years or so. I would have been 24-years old and it would have been six years since the day that Richard gave me that slip of paper. It took my breath away to think of that. Waking up from a dream only to find that my life was but a dream.

I think I've tapped out most of the nay-saying people from my life who would judge me for who I am. I wondered recently if that didn't mean that I was a better judge of character. That the people surrounding me for the purpose of having a weaker person latching on to a stronger one, the old threadbare idea of having someone around that's lower than you, all that seems to be gone now. And never need return. That awful ache in the heart of low men... that sad loneliness becoming a rocketing into the fourth dimension of existence.