May 3, part two: hospital cafeteria (18 minutes)

Mexican corn, red skin mashed potatoes with cream gravy, mustard greens with flecks of yellow and white, a whole wheat dinner roll in a black clamshell. Lots of white coats all around. Hispanic woman and African-American woman at the next booth talking a mile a minute.

"I only work Saturday and Sunday... but if it was any other day..."

Recognition of what is being said fades in and out,

"Yesterday, I mean, it's like..."

blends in with other voices, other tones, high and low, some similar, most not. Doctors and nurses and patients and hospital workers sit in cliques in a big room, like grade school but not age-specific. And people aren't nearly as likely to be picked on. There are plenty of prime suspects, people in masks, people in pajamas, people from other countries, deformed people, medicated people, angry people.

"Now wait a minute... There you go again. --No, you didn't!"

Damn, this food is salty! I refilled my 48 ounce bottle of water in the cafeteria line drink dispenser and I'm already down to the 30 ounce marker. It's hard to not go back for that "cherry pielette" and some half 'n' half. I wonder if cutting out the caffeine will make me crave sweets more. Or is that cutting out the cigarettes? That's what people say:

"I gained all this weight when I stopped smoking."

But, come on, I never smoked that much, one or two cigarettes on average a day. I don't miss it much. And I don't really miss coffee. I miss it when I'm reading to John and can't stop yawning. But that probably doesn't have as much to do with caffeine as it does with breathing deeply enough. Truth be told, I haven't given up caffeine just yet. I have cut way back -- I found a bag of English Breakfast tea in the hotel room and had it this morning, but that's all I've had today. It won't be so hard to cut it out completely when I do the Master Cleanse, which I will do soon, perhaps starting tomorrow, when I get back to Austin. Cindy just did it and said she's a "Jehovah's Witness Convert to the Cleanse" and told me she would be my help desk. She and I always seem to be on the same page, or almost always.

Rumble, rumble, rumble. I need to take a shit. And then maybe I'll have that cherry pielette. John is upstairs getting an EEG. They're trying to decide if he had a stroke when he first got to the hospital this time; he fell unexpectedly.

"There is no making up. There isn't..."

Lots of bald people around here. They and others always smile warmly at me, I think because they think I have cancer, too. Or almost always, unless they're feeling bad themselves and angry at the world. I don't have cancer, yet, not that I know of. In the book I'm reading it says one out of two men will eventually have some form of cancer. Is that me or is that Steven?

May 3, part one: if there were no walls... (25 minutes)

...there would be so much shame in the world. We would huddle in the open doing our business, using the bathroom, scratching our ass, masturbating. We would cut our eyes at each other aggressively, defensively, that's just the way it would be.

If there were no walls, tall buildings would be cold and windy, people wouldn't be able to keep their papers on their desks, would carry rocks in their pockets up the long winding staircases or dangerous elevators to set on top of things, arranged prettily. Women would stop at each others' desks to comment on a particular rock or a particular arrangement of rocks; men would sit silently at their desks forever rearranging their rocks, wishing for bigger rocks, jealous of the other men's rocks.

If there were no walls, places like the Grand Canyon would be revered as even more sacred than they already are. We would flock to the bottom to bathe in the Colorado River and stare up at the great jagged surfaces and pray.

If there were no walls, God would be a tall, vertical, flat thing all around us, closing us in, making us feel enclosed, boxed up, safe.

If there were no walls there would be no silence, gossip would run rampant, tears would flow freely, clothes would always be damp and slightly salty.

If there were no walls, we wouldn't go to restaurants because the doings of the kitchen would upset us too much.

If there were no walls, we would never get any sleep, things would always be buzzing around us, bugs and animals and murderers and rapists and peeping toms, but the peeping toms wouldn't have to work hard to get their fill, they would just have to open their eyes and look around and there we are all around them, doing our business, using the toilet, scratching our ass, masturbating.

If there were no walls we would all be sick, passing our viruses back and forth, no way to contain, nothing to quarantine us.

If there were no walls the ground and floors and other available spaces -- shelves, etc. -- would be cluttered with pictures on stands and machinery and computer parts. There would be no place to put all of these things and people would figure out a way to stack them on top of each other, the bigger items on the bottom working up to the smaller items, and several of those side by side would fill up the open spaces at the top. Stacked up all the way to the ceilings. And then people would realize that those stacked things could be put all around them and form enclosures. They would figure out simultaneously or at close intervals all around the world, in the Americas, in Asia, Europe, etc., that these stacked things would allow them a certain amount of privacy.

In a world full of clever inventions in which everyone can see what the other is doing because it is a world without walls, someone named Tom Wall or something like that would patent an idea for an enclosure, much like a floor or a ceiling but vertical, much like the tall structures in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, only not jagged, not at first anyway, and he would put his name on this brilliant idea before anyone in Italy or Germany had the wherewithal to do the same and the world would forever be with Walls and not Lantinis or Schmidts.

If there were no walls I would wake up and stretch, rub my eyes and wave at you across the way waking up, stretching and rubbing your eyes in your bed. And you would smile like you always do and you wouldn't think anything of it, and you would walk naked across your bedroom and pee in your toilet, shower and go about your day and I would go about my day and in the backs of our minds we would always be thinking about a world where we were completely closed off from one another, from everybody, and how unnatural and not to mention really weird that would be.