How to Smear Blood on the Tracks

If your Wernicke’s-area has been surgically repaired by a Lil’ Ben Affleck™ robot surgeon, do not cut a breathless promo upon the revival of your capacity for speech. If there is now nothing BUT time to bloviate about the placeless place in the open field of divinity you occupied while zapped of Wernicke’s, then say only to Emily, “Thank you for your support during this trying time!” Don’t explain that while you might have appeared, in ableist language, ' retarded, ' you and your dorsolateral prefrontal right cortex had been doing just dandy.

One: If Emily inquires regarding frustrations faced by a man with your “gift of gab” suffering speech loss, i.e. ‘Convincing herself the reversal surgery was money well spent, ’ refer her to McGilchrist’s Frontier Psychiatrist interview to illustrate how without the left brain imposing its empty unwarranted optimism, its empirical pathologies of paranoia, without its inauthentic representation of the right hemisphere’s authentic presencing, then zapped of Wernicke’s you’d been afforded the necessary distance from the world that allowed Emerson to move the transcendental needle a notch or two.

Two: If Emily saddens as Emerson is referenced, i.e. ‘Maybe a bad idea to get you the $1,340,000 surgery after you’d been free from imperiousness for the first time in your adult life, ’ then essay some low-end zingers regarding hospital gown insufficiencies to assuage her buyer’s remorse.

Three: If driven home, see the forests, the nighttime, and the 90km/h signs as part of the placeless place knowable only as an open field of divinity. Roll down the window. If the wind blows across your brow, pray that all your trials are for a reason, making you more than just a vessel of vanity. If preparing for a change of seasons, the Fall, affect contrition for once. Pause the Meister Eckhart audiobook on the car speakers when he says, “You must come to an unknowing. ” Start to raise your Eurekaean index finger before lowering it, knowing that’s exactly what Meister warns against. Chastise yourself for knowing even that.

Four: If Emily says with chagrin, “We already listened to this one, ” then change the audiobook to Thomas Merton’s What is Contemplation.

Five: If Emily requests 90s hits on SiriusXM’s appropriately-named 90s Hits station, give Audible proselytizing and revelating one last shot with Christian Meditation, in which James Finlay states, “In the divine encounter is the falling away of who we imagine ourselves to be. ”

Six: If this fundamentally disturbs Emily, i.e. ‘I don’t want who I imagine myself or yourself to be to fall away, ’ then accede to 90s Hits while listening to Finlay on her headphones, kind of rude since you haven’t spoken to Emily in six months.

Seven: If 90s Hits are sufficient satisfactions of the world for Emily, enjoy with subdued zealotry James Finlay’s discursions around the biblical passage, “If our heart condemns us, God is greater than our hearts, ” meaning even if you can’t forgive yourself for burning Stacey Keats and the crackling sounds wrought thereby, for selling out mankind only to revive the Catherine internal, for your bizarre masturbatory peccadilloes, your invalidation games, your chronic low mood and the fair flowers crushed underfoot as a result, for all the fathers and mothers who’d adored you only to be passed by like so many admirers made meaningless by virtue of their admiration, for the paperbacks hurled at terrified house cats at the tail-ends of benders—if your heart rightly condemns you for all that, Finlay, in his soothing monk voice, will remind you through Emily’s AirPods that God is greater than our hearts.

Eight: Break yoga mat bread with Emily. Speak a humble prayer of gratitude for all the meals you couldn’t express gratitude for during your prolonged silence. If Emily seems peevish about all the “Jesus stuff!” i.e. “I bought you this $1.5 m surgery hoping you’d talk about the things on TV we like and not just drone on about a bunch of bible analysis guys no one’s heard of and really isn’t that just the same old narcissistic-histrionic personality disorder we were trying to fix anyways?” then say only secret blessings over your Rotisserie- Style Chicken Caesar Melt from Subway.

Nine: If Emily desires a post-prandial viewing of a program from the Real Housewives of… series of programs, which you’d purportedly been “enjoying” during your convalescence, excuse yourself to the bathroom so you can zealously read your gold-leafed King James Prophecy Bible on the toilet. Open randomly to James 1: 5-8’s warning against wavering and double-mindedness.

Ten: Realize that like Kerouac “whenever Spring comes to New York” your double-mindedness has “just got to go, ” because if certain, you mustn’t wavereth while being tossed by winds of Desperate Housewifery, real or imagined. If you Google local monasteries, find the Holy Cross Priory clothed in the drabbest of humilities. If Emily has been hypnotized into slumber by the artificial effervescence of real housewives, then write her a goodbye letter quoting the well-loved Leonard Cohen song, So Long Marianne: Well, you know that I love to live with you But you make me forget so very much I forget to pray for the angels And then the angels forget to pray for us And then, hopefully to cheer her up, from Daniel Romano’s There’s a Hardship: And my lady she’s got everything She was born already free Yes and she could go most anywhere But she sinks down here with me i.e. ‘Don’t need to be sunken and mired with me anymore, at least. ’ If it is cruel to abandon Emily with so little as these songs after she’s spent her life loving you, then you must believe with unwavering certainty that Emily is but a manifestation of an infinite generosity that all must return to, and that the packing of your humble Herschel bag and your deconvolutional Uber Pooling to the priory is no abandonment per se, but only a spoke in the cycle of eternal return. Hear her sneeze one last time and mouth the word,

“Gesundheit, ” before thinking, “No, that’s not right. ”