There are winds with negative ions and winds with positive ions, she told me someone told her. Someone who should know. Someone with a crystal hanging over her television. The positive-ion winds are debilitating. They make you depressed or or ennervated or otherwise fuck with your head.

The man on the radio said half of everyone in Austria is “Wetterf

Monkey helpers for the disabled.
[via mighty girl]

Best of dongresin.

So it’s after three in the morning and she’s in the bathroom taking off her makeup and your man’s at the other end of the hall on the bed in his t-shirt singing. The kids are at their grandparents and he’s full of wine and champagne and his hair stinks of smoke from the bar and he’s sort of crooning this song he always sings because it fits his mood and also it’s the only song he knows all the words to that’s not a Christmas carol.

She says something at the other end of the hall.

He stops singing. “What?” he says.

“I said you have a nice voice. Please keep singing.”

So he does.

I got home and my wife told me X “went for a stroll and dropped dead.”

I think she mentioned he was walking along the Danube. This would have been Sunday or Monday. We agreed he was about our age. Far too young to go dropping dead.

Heart attack. It turned out he was 56, not our age. Also: pacemaker. He looked good for someone 56 years old with a pacemaker. Now I have this image of his final moments: watching a swan, perhaps. Or a sunset. Some kid rolls past on a skateboard, yakking into his cellphone, “zzzt.”

He was a nice man. He worked in education. The news saddened us. It also made me think, “that was close.” It could have been me. That feeling was mitigated when I found out he was 12 years older than me. When I heard, “pacemaker,” death moved another step away, I told myself. I sat in the library with a glass of Bushmills and listened to the day’s overtones circle in my daughter’s harp. Then it got late and I had things to do.