September 11 in New York

Like most people I am lucky in some respects and unlucky in others. Who knows how to balance the two; when it's all over, the blackboard is erased before anyone has time to tally a final count and it doesn't even matter any more. And over time the good and bad get so inextricably mixed up with one another, so dependent in the long, rambling causal chain of events, that it's pointless to think of them as separate things.

I'm setting out on one of life's great adventures on Sunday, starting with a speech in Dublin for Google's European customers, moving on to Moscow and then wending my way across Siberia by train to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, followed by another train to Ulan Bataar and Mongolia, the Chinese "iron rooster" to Beijing for the 60th Anniversary of the fall of Chiang Kai-shek, a trip to Guilin along the legendary Li River featured in so much ancient poetry, to Chengdu and the mythical mountain of Emei-shan, to Lhasa, Tibet and a drive all the way through the heart of the Himalayas to Kathmandu, a chicken bus through Nepal to India and Varnasi for the Festival of Lights, Agra, Aurangabad, Ajanta and Ellora, the fairy tale cities of Rajasthan and the massive annual camel fair at Pushkar, and finally a stint in the tropical paradise of Kerala to wind down before re-entering the workforce. I’ll be cataloging my experiences in this blog.

I should start by admitting I've been egged on to take this big trip by bad news. Three months ago a slight tremor below the right eye and at the corner of the mouth triggered a series of CAT scans and MRIs that led to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. MS is an illness where your own immune system starts eating away at the insulation around the brain, until your neurons becomes islands unto themselves, like a conductor flailing his baton in a closet as the orchestra silently sits at attention in the concert hall awaiting instructions that never come. There are multiple potential outcomes, there are new, experimental drugs, but the whole thing is profoundly sobering and I’m not sure what the future brings.

It’s hard for me to be optimistic because I watched my wife break down a little over three years ago from a similar but even worse illness, PML, an opportunistic infection related to her being HIV-positive (a status I thankfully do not share, VERY lucky) that ended her life in a little over three months. PML is informally called "MS on steroids" and I remember every symptom quite vividly.

So fuck this, I’m enjoying life while I still can.

Google is letting me take the time off as an unpaid sabbatical. I’ve had multiple send-offs from various friends that have made the whole thing seem like a trans-atlantic bon voyage from a previous century. Last night Jeannie Gammon threw a remarkably debauched send-off in the old DoubleClick style complete with dancing, laughter, inadvisable texting to members of the opposite sex, free shots passed around and multiple incidents of a female colleague who shall remain nameless drunkenly ass-spanking male participants. Then my improv group, Lascivious Jones, gave me a really amazing goodbye present wrapped in paper that’s a photo of me in Mali with a kid wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt. My mother gave me a bible that her parents gave her when she went off to college. My musician buddies had a last jam session out on a private extension of the High Line. More revelries tomorrow night, and then I’m off.

It is September 11 in New York as I contemplate all of this, driving across the Triborough Bridge and looking out at the two beams of light that shoot upward into the overhanging clouds from Ground Zero. They’re no replacement for what was lost, but they have a singular beauty, built as they are on a foundation of disaster. It was a cold, rainy night like this one, eight years ago after the towers fell, when I wandered the streets of Manhattan and walked past the walls of leaflets flapping in the wind outside the hospitals and scattered across lamp posts along the streets, hundreds of forlorn little love-letters taped together in unruly rows and just about ready to fall down, the dead hope of them congealed into an organic monument with more profundity than anything that could ever be put together on purpose.

After awhile it was hard to keep looking at them and maintain a sense of the humanity of each, but every once in awhile one of them crawled up into your soul and took residence. One that jumped out at me was Winston, a middle-aged man whose face was everywhere then. I finally Googled him and found out that he lived on Long Island and cared for a wife with a profound disability, waking up at 5am to chop her food into tiny digestible bits each morning so that she could eat. I wonder what happened to her. Now that I think about it, she may have had MS.