After forcing my way through the last couple of months, I am finally no longer working. I no longer have the energy or the strength to work a full time job. I suppose it is what growing old feels like: the slow, wearing away of one’s physical abilities and the slight and constant pains associated with seemingly inconsequential movements. Supposedly, I have a new kidney coming. I am waiting to see what complications are in store. I have been able to put off dialysis, mainly through sheer , dogged stubborness. But not even the stubborn man can stave off death forever. If this doesn’t work out in a few weeks, waiting another month won’t be an option. Or rather, the options will be between immediate dialysis and death.

When my Aunt Petey slipped into a coma, the family finally decided to take her off dialysis and bring her into her eldest son’s home. The three sisters (my mother, Aunt Millie and Aunt Kerry) gathered around the hospital bed that hospice had installed in the living room and sang old songs like a family in some epic, sod-buster novel. I loved my aunt, but I never liked those kinds of novels. Too far from my urban, over intellectualized existence. When it was my turn to hold vigil, I read from The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius. She took nearly a week to die. We were unprepared for it to last so long. The doctors said maybe a day or two. She was too full of her body’s own poisons. But there was that stubborness, again. She was frail, but her father, my Paw Paw, only produced one child who wasn’t unnaturally stubborn – and Aunt Petey wasn’t that one.

So why the cliched title? “The First Day of the Rest of My Life?” Is it because I have a new found love of life and a desire to go on. No, my will is more Nietzschean – more wrapped up in thanatos than eros or agape. I just can’t get over how strange it feels to be dying. To face the possibility of measuring out the last moments of earthly existence with Eliot’s coffee spoons.

There is a secret reason we use Facebook. And it’s not self-aggrandizement, not obsessive status updates. It is not even finding out who’s still single.

It is seeing that she got fat.

Maybe not morbidly obese, but definitely not the girl who looked good in a bikini. The one who broke your heart. Who maybe cheated on you. Maybe you thought she was the one. Or maybe you were just angry that you put up with little rat dogs for so long, just to get dumped.

Whatever.

The point is, Facebook has pictures of her looking fat.

There they are. You know that maybe you haven’t aged like find wine either. You’ve got a little more gut and a little less hair. But you haven’t been so foolish as to post, where any ex-girlfriend could find them, photos that clearly depict your decay.

But she has.

This doesn’t reflect well on me or you or any of us. It’s a selfish, un-Christ-like pleasure. But it goes down like a cold beer after a long day at work. You hear the whoosh of air when you crack the cap and that first, refreshing, foamy wave of sweet beery goodness flow over tongue, washing away the world’s pain as it goes down.

It won’t last forever. It may be associated with painful hangovers and shrunken livers. It does not replace true love, sunsets, and great art.

But it feels so damn good for just a little while, doesn’t it?

My cousin called me the other day to tell me that the transplant center in Baltimore had declared us a match. I could accept her kidney.

Her mother had donated a kidney to my mother. So this was keeping with a sort of tradition.

It is difficult to explain how feels to be told that you are now significantly less likely to die in the next six months. That, some day soon – perhaps in as little as a month – you will feel better in ways you can’t even understand right now, because it’s been so long since you weren’t feeling the constant ache, fatigue, and pains of a body slowly poisoning itself.

In the movies or books, poison moves swiftly. I don’t remember the context, but my friend Ryan, back in 1995, assured me that, no, being poisoned is actually an exceedingly painful way to die. Well, I can now vouch for that truth.

Of course, I haven’t died. Not yet. And I may not now for many years.

First your’re just tired. Then stairs get tough. Standing (more so than walking) is tough. Your girlfriend wants to go out for dinner and movie and you have to explain that you only have the energy to do one of those thing. Then one day, it all breaks. You can’t go out at all. You can do one thing day. I have to start taking days off work because you just can’t move. If you do work, that’s all you can do. If you don’t work – you can do one thing that day outside of the house. And you feel a little ashamed on the subway because you have to sit down and sometimes it is crowded and an older lady has to stand and you want to give her your seat, but you just can’t stand for that long. And you think everyone is looking at you because here you are, a healthy looking young man making this old woman stand. You tell your girlfriend about this experience and make a joke about how even though you probably look better than you have in years (because you’re losing weight), you actually feel so awful in a way you can’t even describe. And she looks at you funny and says that everyone has commented about sick you look these, but no one has said it your face. And in someone ways, you feel better, because maybe the old lady understood that you weren’t well, but you’d also been clinging to the fantasy that you still looked ok, but apparently people have been able to tell for weeks or even months that you’ve been dying at a significantly faster rate than other people.

I don’t go to confession (or reconciliation – which  is the correct term, I believe) very often. Far less often than I should. And I admit to leaving the sanctity of the confessional with mixed feelings about sex and sexuality and am a terribly hypocrite for at least a week afterwards (like the child who tries to be good, starting 48 hours before Christmas, to make up for having been so rotten the previous 11 months and 3 weeks.)

But I will say this – 2 out of 3 times, something good happens to me within a few hours of receiving absolution.

This time, I found out that my cousin’s kidney is a match for me and that a transplant can go through. I’m not saying this is causal, but it can feel that way sometimes.

The barbershop is sort of sacred place for men. We want a little pampering and grooming, but it must not look like we want it. Which is why your average barbershop is far less inviting looking that a comparable hair salon, which focuses more on female clientele.

The whole process is very an erotic experience – especially when done with as many fashioned implements as possible, especially straight razors. A good barber will trim and shape my beard, shave my neck and upper cheeks, clip my eyebrows, cut out any longish hairs growing from my ears (yes – I am reaching that age), and finish the back of my neck with a razor. He or she will also, of course, cut my hair.

There was a wonderful barber – a woman – in Pennsville, New Jersey, just across the bridge from Wilmington and Philadelphia. For a pittance (a little as $10) she would do the whole deal. And that included applying a straight razor to my face, which is a sometimes frightening, but also exhilarating experience. Of course, it helped that back then, I was simply getting my head buzzed down to stubble, which was my way of accepting the fact that I was beginning to lose my hair (it seemed more dignified to just run with it than to try to hide it – which I am still at pains to balance).

In the basement of  the Rayburn House Office Building in the U.S. Capitol Complex resides Joe’s the barber. There are actually three barbers there – old Italian Joe, the middle aged black man, and the young Asian man. You would think that Joe would be the best. And indeed, nothing quite completes the image of the barber shop experience like having an old Italian man do the job for you (I would also include old Cuban men and old Puerto Rican men). What that image leaves out, however, is that Joe isn’t terribly concerned about what you think of his work unless you are at least a congressman. The young guy is sweet, but I’d be lying if I said I had complete faith in his skills. No – I would suggest trying to get the black man to do your hair.

Lately, I’ve been bouncing between two places in downtown. One is the quintessential old man’s club. A coterie of aging warhorses come in there for their monthly visits. It’s classic, but I can’t help but feel that I am seen as an interloper in a world of after dinner brandies and camel hair jackets. The other place is Jose’s – but my barber is actually an officious Chinese woman. She’s fast, she’s a completist, and she remembers her customers.

I believe in God. I think I fear God, though maybe not enough. I love God, but maybe not more than I am angry at him. As I contemplate the medical bills piling up, the ever increasing number of medications I am put on after every visit to the doctor, and the simple fact that – at only 36 and owing solely to heredity and biology and not through any action or inaction of my own – some of my internal organs have taken it upon themselves to pack it in. I can’t work like I used to. Even if I could afford it, I can’t go out like I used to – I get too tired and basically need to be home by 9 pm or else my exhaustion and crankiness makes me unbearable.

We are all dying, from the moment we are born we begin to die. My own troubles might (with a transplant or some other procedure and some luck) be reversed. But the fact remains that, for now, we are all dying, but I am dying faster than most.

It has brought my closer to God, but it has not made us more intimate. I has made me crankier towards him.

During noon mass, the sermon focused on Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz), who wrote admirably about the darkness. I was, no doubt, appropriate for my mood, but did not uplift me.

All I can say is, that I am trying. I am reading J.K. Huysman’s later novels about his life after his conversion (though I miss the delicious evil, the sex, and the femme fatales, and the black masses of his earlier works). Tomorrow, I will go to a penitent service and make my confession. I haven’t been in a while, so am going to a church near my work rather than my home parish – I am ashamed to reveal how slack I have been to Father Bill.

My companion is angry, too. She is contemplating a life without me. Or a life with a me who is dehabilitated by illness. Or by the poverty of mounting medical costs and a declining ability to earn the money to pay them off. It is not what she signed up for. And I am sometimes angry with her for feeling that way. No one likes to be weak, to be dependent. To be less than you were just a short time ago.

She also doesn’t like the church. She thought she was attaching herself to a young, atheist intellectual. Not a prematurely weak Catholic. Nominally Buddhist, effectively irreligious, she has not truck with the church’s western version of mysticism. The rituals and requirements seem like mere idolatry to her. And it is not in my nature to prosthelytize, so I find myself unable to properly defend my decision – not in the least because I cannot fully understand it myself. If, as I just stated earlier, I am angry at God, what is the function of keeping to these abstruse and difficult decrees? I feel I can’t explain my anger, but neither can I say that I love without equivocation. So I am silent and weak.

I will receive a number of Christmas whose long term value to myself, in terms of utility, will be manifestly less than the money spent on the present. In other words, I would have been able to get more utility from simply having spent that same money on myself. The same will apply to presents I get for others.

That is because the function of Christmas gifts is primarily moral rather economic.

In Conan the Barbarian, the governor of California famously, in response to the question, “what is best in life,” said, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

This is clearly true.

But I submit that we overlook the little things. For example, when drinking too much in a hipster bar, you may find that the bar’s ownership, instead of clearly labeling the restroom doors “men” and “women,” have instead opted to use some sort of cryptic pictogram that a drunk man is expected to properly interpret.

In that moment, as a man, what is best in life is to open one of the doors and see a urinal: the universal symbol that we have picked the right door.