Hunger gets me high. It always has.

This afternoon I am sitting in a diner waiting for a cheeseburger and coffee. My head hums silently, like the brain is out to wash. My arms are numb, my hands and fingers feel like air is blowing through them.

It's been 27 hours since I ate something besides coffee or beer and I know I have to eat but this body I'm in feels too unusual, too tantalizing to satisfy. I nearly bring up my arms to hug myself, I feel so crazy, and my eyes unintentionally linger among the faces of a group of obese men sitting at some tables across the aisle.

They ignore me, and I'm not thinking about them. They talk busily among themselves, one of them passes the salt, another coughs; they seem to enjoy the company of each other.

I don't know how long I sat there gaping in their direction, but when I noticed my head rocking to the left and to the right I looked away, not wanting to frighten them or cause a ruckus. I look at the table. At the store-bought place mat which has instructions for making weak drinks. I'm hungry as hell and it feels good. Where is that grain of rice I ordered for lunch?

The radio plays 70's music. Someone at a table behind me stirs their coffee with thoroughness and efficient vigor, making a terrific clatter that fills my head for many, many seconds while the spoon smashes the insides of the porcelain cup. Dissolving the sugar.

Who needs grass, I think to myself.

I saw Boogie Nights last night, and liked it well enough. Marky Mark certainly made for a believably vacuous porn star. The movie follows the careers and lives of a group of people who did porn movies in the late 70's and early 80's. Some of the stories were interesting, others not; this one guy throughout the film kept finding his wife having sex with some other guy. In the end he murdered his wife, whoever she was fucking at that moment, and then himself. Somehow, I didn't really like that story. It was obvious, and who needs to be reminded that married life can be so filled with crap?

(That was rhetorical.)

I started crying at one point in Boogie Nights. It was during a brief scene in which a woman gives birth to a baby boy, her husband there with her. I have discovered in the past several months that I can not as talk or even think about scenes like that without becoming incredibly sad. And I guess the reasons for this are nothing mysterious. There are few things in life I could really ever say that I really, really want, but helping to bring a person into the world and being there when it happens is one of them.

My new year's resolution for 1993 was to be married or engaged-to-be-married by the end of that year. Nothing happened that year or in any year since to bring me any closer to that goal of such questionable merit. And I don't dwell on it, but I think of it when I see or hear about someone having a baby.

It is strange to think about the things in life which seem completely out of your reach. For some it is nothing more than the company of other people. For others it is wealth, or power. For most I suspect that it is something indescribable, some ephemeral experience which can never occur except through miracles or impossible intervention.

When I read stories of people saying they were abducted by aliens I become terribly, terribly sad. And to some extent I feel the same when people become fanatical over ludicrous conspiracy theories.

One day in 1991 a woman I worked with pulled me aside to say she'd been seeing ghosts behind the counter and racing through walls of the record store at which we worked. As much as I'd like to believe in miracles, in ghosts, in flying saucers and sprites and adepts and phenomena for which there is no earthly explanation, my only thought was "I wish there was something I could do for you." But I did not say it. I did not say anything.

When will life become so empty that I will fantasize a new existence for myself? When will my days become so numb that the most outrageous tales become the folklore of my life? And goddamit when do I get taken aboard the mother ship?

Maybe never. I'm told that having kids "does all that." Having kids puts you on the mother ship, it is that miracle, and of course it changes everything. Not to be cynical, but I doubt that it could change every damn thing in my life, or even a whole lot. I don't think that is why I want it.

Who knows anything, anyway? Certainly not I.