I’ve passed nearly a month of silence from these posts.  It’s a good thing – I’ve been too busy living to write.  Marcus’s emergence from the cocoon of secondary school, an uptick in my work schedule, a miraculous California weekend with friends, and even a return to my beloved “night job” of video editing have kept me off the keyboard.

But I’m once again in a confessional frame, to expiate my new sin of promiscuous carnivorosity.

I know, it’s not a word.  But there are no words for the blood-lust of my current eating habits.  Euphemistically dubbed the “Modified Atkins” diet for G-rated marketing purposes, it should really be named the “Feedlot Delight” or the “PETA’s Most Wanted” regime.   As much bacon, steak, fat, tallow, grease, lard, butter, eggs, cream, chops, haunches, patties, roasts and organs as I can manage.  An acquaintance today informed me of a website where I can order specially-prepared duck lard, to add to the ghoulish mess.  I did not ask what you put the duck-lard on, or whether you just eat it straight with a spoon.

On the flipside, no sugars or carbs of any kind – no fruit, no bread, no pasta, not even fleshy vegetables such as carrots or artichoke.  Onions are borderline verboten.  For the first months, only 30 carb grams or less per day.  You exceed that with an apple.

Although I crave mightily the whole-grain breads, fresh pastas, and sweet nectarines of my previous dietary virtue, I confess I’m reveling in the gore.  Last week I had a business breakfast at a restaurant famed for biscuits and beignets.  I defiantly ordered a cheese omelet with two sides of bacon.  The waitress recoiled but complied, and the six strips arrived in a tic-tac-toe lattice of shame.  When she came back to see if we needed anything else, I replied devilishly, “More bacon.”  They nearly kicked me out.

The reason for all this carnivorosity is that the modified Atkins diet has been allegedly “shown” to control seizure.  I take this advice with a large dose of skepticism, given that the current state of nutrition research makes Congress look like a house of consensus.  The diet bookshelf at Barnes and Noble chiefly features books debunking other books, labeling the opposite views as hoaxes and cons, perpetrated either by agribusiness or the scaremongering media.  I’ve never paid it any attention.  But as I tick off the non-invasive options left on my list, this one seemed like the next thing to try, before I go back to my old friend cannabis (the reason I haven’t tried that yet is that I recall pot as making you stupid, and in my vanity I think I’d rather seize).

Two weeks in, it’s so far, so good.  If this works, I’ll have to figure out how to climb at least a branch or two down the food chain, so as to lighten my conscience and unclog my arteries.  No doubt I’ll be gulping protein powders, perhaps fortified with cubes of defrosted blood-worms, such as I used to feed to my kids’ tropical fish.  Then I’ll be offending no one except the six militant members of Humanitarians Upholding the Rights of Larvae (HURL).  That I think I can handle.  How I’ll face a lifetime of Stevia and almond flour makes me more nervous – but I’m comforted by the fact that, in a few years, the dietary advice will change again, and I’ll be gorging on croissants AND pate de fois gras.

One of the biggest challenges of my epilepsy is that I can’t drive.  One of the biggest gifts is that I have to walk.

The Time Sunday Magazine published this week a series of vignettes on “Walking in New York.”  They were about family, ethnicity, history, memory, the idea of walking from place A to place B.  None were about the experience of having to walk.

The “having to” is actually the best part.  You walk when you’d rather not: when you’re tired, when the weather sucks, when you’re late.  But that’s when the walking gets into your feet, your joints, your breath.  You feel exactly your age.  Your gait takes on a four-beat tempo of an old rock ballad — a voice you grew up with, now toughening from the flute of desire to the baritone sax of nostalgia.

It’s also the repetition that matters.  When you first arrive in a foreign city, especially in the southern hemisphere, the environment assaults you.  Uneven and narrow sidewalks will trip you flat if you don’t pay attention.  Heat, laden with diesel and rotted food, will nauseate you.  Trinket sellers will hound you immediately.  But if you stay a few months, the street and air turn liquid, your walk becomes a subtle weave, and the touts don’t bother you at all.  Even this year, staying at home in a town where I’ve lived off-and-on for 20 years, I experience “taking a walk” as a sort of tourism.  To walk the same route every day is to become a local.

You escape the cocoon of power.  Drivers own the road, taking their mobile living rooms with them.  Walking, or waiting for a bus, I play a game from Gladwell’s “Blink”, forming micro-impressions of passing drivers.  Cellphone screamer, NPR indignant, Limbaugh indignant (I distinguish these by the cars they drive), turbo-mom, tech guy who can’t pull his head out of his OS, berated secretary, pressured salesman, muffler-deficient frat boy, parking-deficient sorority girl, tyrant boss, terrified teen, predator, prey.  Occasionally a driver spots me peeping.  In the last split second he glares back: “What are YOU looking at?”  Of course I’ve invaded his sanctum.  But I’ve also presumed on his status, like a commoner looking into a carriage.

Finally, you travel light.  These days, most of my morning walks are to the Courthouse for mediations.  It has a status-sorted taxonomy of justice.   Judges — the primates of the zoo — cruise into a gated underground door.  Big cat lawyers and canine paralegals unload banker’s boxes of trial exhibits from black SUVs.  Ungulate plaintiffs and defendants carry their burden of complaints, summonses and citations.  I, a new member of the order rodentia, walk up to the security station with nothing but a satchel containing reading glasses, a sack lunch, a pen and tablet, a laptop to draft an agreement or calculate child support, and a packet of Kleenex because somebody’s going to cry.

Afterwards, I often walk home lugging the weight of someone else’s sorrow.  Like the briefly-married couple agonizing over how to co-parent, for the next twenty years, a child who is now just six months old.  But comforting me is a sidewalk still wet from a three-day spring storm, strewn with dozens of earthworms.  Most of them are already lifeless and flat, but a few long red fellows flex robustly, washed unwillingly onto the concrete and determined to get off it before a robin gets them.  I play another of my favorite walking games.  Counting blessings is trite, obvious, the thing your grandmother scolded you into doing.  But you know, things become cliché for a reason.  And on this walk, I count two joys that were never on my list before: how I get from A to B, and the work I do once I arrive.

Right now we’re in an earthquake of flowers.  All at once.  The crabapple and cherry blossoms went mad with blooms three weeks early and are now shaking their petals onto the daffodils and tulips.  Crocus and grape hyacinth are practically buried.  Even phlox, forget-me-nots, lilacs, and sweet william are vying for attention.   TODAY, our local earth seems to shout.  Look at ME! May will be too late, too hot, too dry!  Holy God, even the campus evangelists have emerged, holding out bright green testaments as unfurled students walk sinfully by.

I can’t ignore the tectonics of spring, wouldn’t want to if I could.  Walking to work in the midst of so much glory, I am overcome with NOW.  This morning, I say: to hell with the future.  To hell with the fact that these flowers are blooming before bees are out to pollinate them.  To hell with the fact that last fall’s freakish temperature swing – from 65 to -5 in a day – nearly killed every shrub in our privet hedge, cultivated these last 18 years.  To hell with the summer’s impending fire season.  To hell with the neighbors activating their sprinklers a full month earlier than usual.  Come June, when this crowd of blooms has burned off and folks are watering fruitlessly into crunchy lawns, there will be time to mourn these things.  Not today.

Dostoevsky, a great narrator of the now, wrote of the final seconds before his seizures: “During a few moments I feel such happiness that is impossible to realize at other times, and other people cannot imagine it. I feel a complete harmony within myself and in the world, and this feeling is so strong and so sweet that for a few seconds of this enjoyment one would readily exchange ten years of one’s life – perhaps even one’s whole life.”  My own seizures are too mild, and too sudden, to provoke such ecstasy, but they do sharpen my attention.  I wonder whether, in the timeline of the human species, our generation is living through a kind of ecstatic blaze before darkness.  Certainly this idea is common to both the fundamentalist Christian concept of rapture and the ISIS ideology of end times — the spectrum of human thought being circular, after all, not linear — but I suspect that any apocalypse will be a slow-motion affair.  Perhaps it’s already underway.  If so, we will have time to face the future, but also live defiantly in the now — with or without flowers.