This morning I read that smokers wish to die at least as much as they wish to live.

I wonder about that as I sit alone in my dingy hotel room inhaling the warm rancid smoke of my cigarette. Several times this week I have woken up and gone into work and looked around at the dangers that surrounded me and thought, “today I think I will be killed, the best and the worst I can hope for is that my body will merely be broken and agonizing pain will be my life.” I see it all happen in my mind. I see myself rejecting peoples sympathies and thinking myself some kind of hero. As I work around high pressure gas lines, I see the news paper headlines announcing that a son was killed by an exploding gas line the same as the father. I see people thinking about this strange coincidence and friends, especially those few who know my father, talking about it with others and holding onto the story and treasuring it as if it were their own.

On Thursday, we were fixing a water leak. It was a wet muddy hell of a hole. The banks were crumbling everywhere. Our feet were most often stuck where we placed them until we could dig them out. I was shoveling that shit with Charlie when out of the blue he very slowly calmly said me name, “Mike.” I didn’t look. I didn’t say anything. I just slowly and calmly stepped to the side just in time for several thousands of pounds of clay to fall into the place where I was standing. I didn’t even look to watch it fall, I merely went back to shoveling as if it was routine. And guess it is.

I wonder sometimes if my embrace of life’s dangers has any connection to Freud’s “death wish”?