After the eating there is the walking and there is the putting the tinfoil and paper and all of the wrapping into the garbage and there is the rushing off to your gate. But when you have gone to your gate, there are the bags and the bins and the men with the trucks and the roads and the gates and there are the engines doing the beeping and the backs of the trucks doing the tilting and doing the dumping and the garbage doing the sliding and the garbage hitting the ground and the holes in the ground getting fuller and you can hear the ground groaning.

You can hear the ground groaning and you can hear it saying, “No, please, not more, I just can’t take any more, please, won’t you stop? Won’t you please stop? It is hurting so much and there is no room, please won’t you stop? It is getting too much. It was OK for so long but now it is getting too much. Why can’t you see? Isn’t it clear? I thought it was clear. Why don’t you see? If you don’t stop I don’t know what I will do. I don’t know what I will do, but I think I will have to fight back. I mean it, I will have to fight back. I will have to do something because I cannot do what I am doing. I do not know what it will be but it will be something and it will be painful and you will not like it and it will be harder than eating a sandwich held in your hand and exposed to the air. It will be harder than that, much harder than that. I don’t mean to be mean but it’s all I can do and can’t you see I’m hurting? Can’t you see I’m full? Can’t you see I’m empty? Can’t you see it? ! But you don’t see it. You don’t see it. Why don’t you see it? You just keep going and going and wrapping and taping and bagging and eating and throwing and rushing until it’s too late and I hope it’s not too late for you I hope it’s not too late for me I hope it’s not too late.”

An old girlfriend of mine said she knew our relationship would never last once she saw my obsession with understanding things instead of chilling out and accepting things or, as she put it — “surrendering to the emptiness of life.”

I am constantly torn between the heros of the east — who are heros for their ability to see things as they really are — and the heros of the west — who are heros for their ability to see things that are not but that should be, and then to build them. One is mainly about accepting, the other is mainly about rejecting and creating. Being from the U.S., it is natural for me to have the second kind of heros, even as I see the wisdom of the first. But whenever I try to behave like an eastern hero, it always feels like posing, wasting time, or giving up.

Maybe giving up the struggle and learning to float along is the only wise thing. But at my age I can’t quite accept that, because I am too busy picking up coins and staring into the clouds to see what I can make of them.