I am writing this on an Amtrak Unreserved Coach train plodding toward Washington, D.C. This is all very well and good, except I started out on a somewhat zippier Acela Express in Business Class. Due to unspecified mechanical difficulties, this stopped for an hour in the wilds of New Jersey and then was put out of service in Philadelphia. I will arrive at my destination almost three hours late.
Atypically, I am not concerned.
Yesterday, I figured out why I have been lately making little progress on my personal goals (read: no progress). Due to an exhaustive regimen of acupuncture, psychotherapy, energy massage, kundalini yoga, and meditation—and the judicious addition of a certain medication and a special magical talisman that I will write about at a later date—the crushing anxiety that governed my life for years is subsiding. Since this was my primary motivation for accomplishing anything, I am left oddly aimless, my gym routine and novel languishing in an uncertain limbo. Even my germophobia seems to be fading: not only do I no longer clean my kitchen, in a thoroughly unprecedented turn of events, I recently swallowed a vitamin that fell on the dirty linoleum floor and rolled behind the recycling bin.
So here I sit on the Amtrak. A pudgy businessman has been braying into his mobile phone for an hour. Chunks of ice are jumping off the tracks and slamming into the bottom of the train, making me feel as if I am navigating an asteroid field in the Millennium Falcon. As usual, I hate everyone in the vicinity. But it is a cranky and abstract—almost perfunctory—hatred, and not the murderous rage I usually feel.
What is happening to me?
