Anyway, I’m fine, in varying shades of purple. The lesson here is always wear a helmet when bicycling. I was wearing my helmet and if I hadn’t been I might not be typing this right now, and just think how sad you’d be. Also, eff you U.S. health care system ($1,200 for a CAT scan “just to be sure” on the noggin front? Deductible votes no!) and thank heavens I’m a filthy hippie who knows how to take care of myself (ginger for inflammation; arnica for bruising; loads of B vitamins; hatha yoga to prevent stiffness; small quantities of organic beef for iron; an acupuncture session to hit the reset button). Free advice, there you go, no copay necessary.

* * *

I’ve spent a lot of time lying on the couch, giving myself a crash course in American rom-coms. There is no helmet for that, as far as I know, but there should be. It should’ve been called He’s Just Not That Into You Because You Are a Terrible Movie And He Resents Having His Intelligence Insulted For Two Hours, and 27 Dresses Plus a Free Shotgun For Shooting Your Eyes Out Afterwards.

On the other hand, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People was very good, Kirsten Dunst notwithstanding.

It is nice to have an excuse to lie around and watch movies, even if some of the movies make me angry and my DVD player is held together with Scotch tape.

* * *

Comrade Trying to Schedule Plans: So what’s your deal?
MPS: I’m going to raise commodity prices by establishing a system of “domestic allotments” that will create artificial scarcity conditions
MPS: OH WAIT NO that was FDR’s deal

Gchat: How to lose friends and alienate people.

* * *

Current obsession: traffic islands.

* * *

Fetal joke: Something about the Senate voting down ACORN funding on account of the prostitution video thing and the Senate’s continued funding, via payroll, of David Vitter. (Joke never carried to term. It will not be missed.)

* * *

So what do you think? Brain damage, yes/no?

In the midst of thinking about these matters I flew to New York to help a friend move to the West Coast — so much transition in so short a time — and on a rainy Saturday morning, muscles aching, I woke at six o’clock to put on my black dress and nice shoes, because that is what you do. Smith Street was still except for pigeons and the lingering smell of Friday’s beer, but Atlantic Avenue was bustling already, mostly with men muttering to themselves in doorways. After five years of city living I learned to ignore men who hurl insults or come-ons, but that day, suddenly, I was indignant — couldn’t these cretins see my black dress? Didn’t they know this wasn’t standard garb for Saturday morning? Wasn’t it obvious where I was going?

No and no and no. A man with animal eyes stumbled after me. “Hey pretty. Pretty lady. Come here. You know you want to. I’ll pay you to come over here. Hey!” I kept walking, feet and face forward, brisk, holding back fists and tears. He screamed. “I’ll pay you money! You look like you should buy a thesaurus!”

New York, like death, is at once obvious and incomprehensible.

The train to Long Island was almost empty. My fellow passengers and I stared out the streaky windows at the grey buildings and sipped our paper cups of coffee. I had a copy of The New Yorker on my lap but I couldn’t read it, there were too many words. I skipped around my iPod — the only thing I’ve wanted to hear lately is music involving British and/or Kiwi men, pre-1990, this has been going on for weeks — and none of it sounded good, so I listened to the train’s rattle and those blasted piercing beeps it emits at each stop. I was relieved yet not relieved when the next stop was mine, because it meant finality.

Catholics, of course, do casket viewings and then full Masses. I was less prepared than I thought I would be for both of these things. It had been some time since I’d set foot in a church, especially with the entire family around, and in the middle of the proceedings an urgent whisper spread from one pew to the next: someone had meant to to mention that the granddaughters would be presenting the gifts before Communion, so, a little freelance altar serving, and as it turns out the sense memory of carrying a small glass cruet of wine remains intact after twenty years. I’d forgotten how well I remembered that.

This sounds so weighty and sad and it is weighty and sad. But it is also, in my family, un-weighty and un-sad. The use of the phrase “family-friendly” to indicate an absence of cursing or sarcasm has always amused me, given the things my people say, and at a funeral no less. What pride I felt, when my youngest cousin — #14 of 14 — took an opportunity to crack wise about the names of the dead buried in marble vaults around our grandmother’s casket! How soothing to hear my uncle do the one about the meth addict trying to study! What Zen to reminisce about Ozarka bottled water, a beverage we have been discussing at length for no particular reason since 2006, when we encountered it at my cousin Joseph’s wedding! And by the time Matt was explaining his travails with an freakishly deep ladle it was almost as if rain and death weren’t possible, as if nothing could hurt and there were no mean words in the world, as if our clothes weren’t black and time could stand still long enough to be grasped.

The thing is, I knew I was getting sick several days ago, even before the headache set in, because I started experiencing two familiar (if bizarre) symptoms:

Symptom #1: A brain malfunction that replaces a word or phrase with another word or phrase, completely unrelated, also completely nonsensical. The headline “Debate Continues at Town Hall Meetings” became “Debate Continues at Pork Rind Meetings.” An email from an editor asking for a bio became a request for a door. It always takes me a few moments to recognize that I am having this malfunction, and during those moments I am shocked to think that CNN perpetrated such a ridiculous error, or that my editor thinks I can build doors.

Symptom #2: Mentally writing jokes that are not jokes. They feel like jokes, in that they have an intro or a setup, maybe a reference to current events and then some sort of “punch line,” but really they are just meaningless assemblages of words, often with overtones of violence. Recent actual examples: Did you hear the one about the watch fob that shot your mom, because she is so ugly? And: So this dog walks into a bar and says, “Give me a whiskey, make it a double.” Bartender stares at the dog and then shoots himself, because of Socialism. Not funny. Right. But whenever one of these things floats across my consciousness it makes me laugh, because I assume it’s a joke, and then an hour or so later I realize it’s not.

Diagnosis: Yeah. I’m sure I don’t want to know.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to make myself a cup of hot vertebrate and fucking Eric Cantor and you can all fucking laundromat and go to bed.

Yet as he spends his days in his family’s mansion on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, N.C., Edwards can’t help but fret about how Washington and the country are getting on in his absence.

That John Edwards! Always thinking of others, etc. etc.

Only thing is — and if wanton displays of naïveté aren’t your bag, you should leave right now — I liked this guy. No. I believed in this guy. Not so much in previous campaigns, or when he was yoked, uneasily, to Gore. This time around it was different. (Maybe I was just extra-susceptible.) Sure, the “son of a millworker” schtick wore thin. A lot of people heard it and called it phony, coming from a millionaire trial lawyer. Me, I thought about the men and women I knew who’d stitched shirts for a living, and the way the 4 p.m. sun shone straight through the empty brick buildings in my hometown. I thought: self-made wealth doesn’t mean you can’t understand that. I thought: some people become lawyers because they believe everyone deserves a representative in the halls of justice. That’s why my parents became lawyers, though in the middle of rural Maine lawyers aren’t millionaires.

I’m biased. It’s true. We all are. We gravitate toward politicians who best reflect the particular beliefs and values and ideas we’ve absorbed in our lives, from our parents, our schools, our communities. And it just so happened that I was raised with a certain set of beliefs and experiences, and these included things like soup kitchens and Dorothy Day and serviam, to say nothing of George Orwell and Upton Sinclair. And here comes John Edwards, shaking off his Ken-doll coma, speaking reasonably directly and with a believable (inasmuch as any of this is believable) passion, and with good ideas to boot. It was a hard time. I had no illusions left to lose, and I wanted to believe in something.

I am not a sucker, not often, anyway. But what can you do when you grew up with Pete Seeger and dinner table conversation about homelessness and a man in a suit uses his podium to say this:

I have walked into courtrooms alone to face an army of corporate lawyers with all the money in the world. I have walked off the Senate elevator and been besieged by an army of corporate lobbyists. And I have beaten them over and over again.

But let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience — you cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power — you have to take it from them.

Don’t lecture me about speechwriters and strategists. I’ve been paid good money to put inspiring words in other people’s mouths. I know how this game goes, and even in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, I believed.

Which is why, without telling anyone, I decided to enroll in the Democratic party for the first time in my life, a fact that might amuse those peg me as a rank-and-file lefty. Since my 18th birthday, which I celebrated by going to City Hall and registering to vote, I’d clung to my flanneled-Yankee Independent status on principle, even though it meant forgoing Maine’s lively caucus proceedings. I was in New York in 2006-07, so I mailed in my request for a change of party and an absentee ballot for the Maine Democratic caucus.

While I waited for my registration to be confirmed I spent a lot of time in debate with my politically-engaged friends, all of whom were squarely in the tank for Barack Obama. I stayed up late and woke up early to read speeches and policy reports, sending emails with side-by-side comparisons of health care plans, arguing and defending the man I wanted to be president — although, see above re: illusions, I knew full well he’d lose.

I could not afford make large contributions, much as I wanted to; New York rent and student loans and a useless freelancers’ health insurance policy brought my balance to zero each month. I did, however, hear that a family friend was doing some sort of organizing work with the Edwards campaign, slated to be on the ground in New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and I began investigating the logistics of a bus to Greenville. Work commitments made it impossible. I decided it was all right: the most important thing would be my vote in the Maine caucus.

South Carolina Democrats voted on January 26, nominating Barack Obama by a decisive margin. Four days later I sat on the floor and cried harder than I could remember crying over anything in years, and somehow I didn’t even have the presence of mind to feel embarrassed. John Edwards looked tired, there in New Orleans. He stumbled over a few words and squinted in the wind. He waved and it was over. I sat on the floor for a long time after the newscast moved on to whatever else was happening that afternoon.

The next day I received confirmation of my enrollment in the Maine Democratic Party.

I wish I could tell you how I felt when news of the affair broke. I think for a long time I felt nothing, on purpose. Very few people knew the extent of my emotional commitment to his primary campaign, and for the most part they were tactful. I made careful show of shrugging, but I found myself reading every article, looking at the photos, watching the videos. The story was squalid. His attempt at spin was even more so. The knives came out but for once I couldn’t muster a word, no scorn, no outrage, no jokes. The whole thing seemed small and exhausting.

Eventually I realized that what I felt was resignation, that and the cold slap of inevitability. I had been foolish. I chose to believe in an idea of someone, an idea of someone’s ideals — a politician, no less. I knew better. It’s a lesson I won’t forget again and for that, more than anything, I’m grateful.

*Full disclosure: I did, in the end, joke about it. But not well.

My point is, this is going be in the running for Great American Novel status, even (especially) if it is “nonfiction.”