"Veritas," he said. "Ain't it the truth!"

Two weeks later, walking through the Yard with a friend who was tripping, we saw the same guy carrying a sign which read, "WILL RATIONALITY WORK?"

My friend ran away, holding his head.

March: My feet.

During the month of March, I studied my feet closely, intensely. They were the only thing I could see from where I lay on Dan's couch. Where I lay ten hours a day, listening to Dan's soft breathing in the next room. He slept all day, and I read science fiction books. I read the complete works on Robert Heinlein (with the exception of Between Planets, which I could not find in paperback). Three times. Some of my favorites I read seven or eight times.

I also spent hours reading the previous Sunday's comics and sitting on the toilet. Every day, I found that Sunday's comics were different each day. Depending on whether it was Monday or Wednesday, there were subtle differences of meaning, connotation, and emphasis that I could discern after reading them for an hour. This became very important to me.

But the best moments were those on the couch, spent doing absolutely nothing. As long as I was doing absolutely nothing, nothing nothing, nothing, nothing at all, there was a good chance that at any moment I might begin doing anything in the wide world.

Once or twice I tried to write, or read something for school, but I found that when I began doing something real I experienced a confinement, a shrinkage of identity. An action, a real action, defined me, limited me. In a sense, I became that action, and thus lost all the great, wonderful things I might have been about to do if I had continued to do nothing. It was safer, more pleasant, less worrisome to do nothing to stare at my feet and wait to do something great.

I had been throwing up all the time, and now I began to avoid the Union altogether. At first I ate at Elsie's, but I found I could not digest the food, that the crowd even there was too noisy, that I continued to throw up. So I began subsisting on vanilla ice cream sodas at Brigham's. Getting my soda took a lot of strategy, however, I would wait for times when I thought not many people would be at the take-out counter, then dash out of the Yard at a full run. If more than five people were lined up, I would go back to my room. I began to go at odd hours, in pouring rains, five minutes before closing. It became a battle between me and the crowd.

And I remember looking at my feet for hours, looking across my motion-less body (strewn with Sunday comics and ice-cream soda cups and science fiction books) and listening to Dan sleeping furiously in the next room.

And at a loss for words, I asked myself: How did I get here? How did I do this to myself?

And I told myself: You blew it, boy. This time you really blew it.

Later, of course, came brief Salvation. In April there was a strike, and there was working for the CRIMSON, and there was a black leather jacket with a huge red strike fist on the back to give me an identity and a vague purpose.

But I still would occasionally find myself reading the Sunday funnies uncontrollably, or throwing up at unexpected moments.

And I found (and still find, to this day, to right now) that I could not look down at my slightly hairy, innocently ugly feet without feeling a great and nameless fear.

A Science Wonk Bites the Dust