I walked into the kitchen, said something to Henry, looked at the headlines in the newspaper, and felt a sense of dread steal over me. It’s still here. I thought, by going through everything I looked at and thought about, by doing some detective work, that I would be able to identify the cause and defang the dread, but I haven’t. It remains, and it remains mysterious. I went over the paper, to see if it was something there, but I can’t imagine that the dollar’s descent to parity with the Canadian dollar or even the Mets’ spectacular flameout, unsettling though they are, is responsible for this. It could be the war, of course, but it's not.

We can go a little deeper, we can get personal, it could be my visit with my parents last night, which wasn’t ideal, or my mistaking when Henry’s tennis classes started and causing him to miss the first two sessions, or the fact that I tried to tidy up the house last night and realized that I live in a pigsty shit-hole, or the embarrassment I felt at the end of my tennis lesson, when I almost vomited on the court, or the more private shame of slipping on the bathmat, failing, over several long seconds, to regain my balance, and falling into the tub.

While I try to get to the bottom of this mystery, or better yet, while I don’t, I’ll mention that I’m reading the new Junot Díaz book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. So far my favorite thing about the book is that fact that, with big chunks of it in Spanish and other parts referencing sci-fi stuff I know nothing about, I can barely understand some of what I’m reading. Incomprehensibility, I think, is totally underrated as a literary technique. Not only is it realistic, a tool for representing the life we currently (slang, cell phones, channel-surfing) and kind of eternally (born into history, unable to maintain focus or consciousness) lead, it shows you, again, what writing can do: Writing brings you the pieces, the parts, and you work to make it whole, to solve the mystery. Or you don't.