Along with the fear of aneurysms comes the fear of reduced mental function. This is something that's plagued me since I learned that brain mass doesn't increase beyond 13 years of age (It's a really complicated formula to determine when we have our strongest mental faculties and it varies by individual of course, but there's something interesting about the fact that our brains stop growing before the majroity of us have even started to use them on a regular basis.) I've always been smart, really smart. Other people have accused me of genius (and more than a few times idiocy) but I don't like to think of it in those terms. Comparing people's intellects is always a difficult and in some ways an impossible task. All I know is that I've always been satisfied with my mental function, and I've rarely, if ever, felt inferior to someone when dealing with a subject where I've had any experience or made an effort to have competence. This has defined my life in a lot of ways, from where I've gone to school to who my friends have been (to a degree; I don't eschew relationships with people I don't consider bright, but I don't like spending time with people with wildly different and non-convergent interests, which is fairly normal.) It's my stongest positive attribute. Naturally I'm constantly worrying that it will leave me, like women who obsessively check the mirror for wrinkles or athletes who bristle whenever it's implied that their current poor statistics are the result of increased age rather than a normal slump.
My life is full of these bleak and black thoughts, surging into my head at inopportune moments. Yesterday I got up in the wee hours of the morning to drain the lizard and get a glass of H20 (I think of it as maintaining the body's natural filtration system.) As I was going back to bed a disturbing mental picture flashed through my head. I saw myself lying in bed, with my eyes shut, and next to me lay a horrible creature. It was female (that alone is enough to send chills down anyone's spine) and slimy, like some sort of humanoid fish creature. It was coal black and had long silver claws. Its mouth was like that of Geiger's Alien and it was distinctly smiling, in preparation for the kill. Needless to say it took me about half an hour to calm down and get to sleep, and even then it was less restful than it could have been. I don't know why my mind does these things. It's something I like to chalk up to my creative nature, but at times that feels like a cop out. Yes, Terminator was inspired by a bad dream that James Cameron had, but there are millions of people who have nightmares and hallucinations that don't fuel anything at all except for sleeping pill sales.
I was talking about the mayfly like life-span of the modern marriage recently, and as if to illustrate my point Ricky Williams has called it quits from football. It seems unlikely that the Dolphins will give him the Stadium, but he might get visitation rights with the mascot. If you don't get this joke then you haven't been paying attention to ESPN the Magazine (Can't believe nobody called me on the Sports Illustrated gaffe) and you have sources of humor besides my journal that you probably should be relying on. Like math, or the stars.