Already Dead

 "I feel like...I'm already dead," I thought to myself, walking back from the coffee shop yesterday in the blazing sun, while carrying the remainder of my hot mocha in a paper cup.

The thought had hit me while I was drinking the mocha on the bench outside the front door of the shop, in a small alcove entrance shaded from the sun. I'd walked over there spontaneously a little before noon, feeling in need of more coffee, having woken up before 1 am, as becoming my habit increasingly. I had pushed my time of rising to half past two, in order to have more free time in the morning, and also to have part of day overlap the schedule of the developers whom I oversee as a team lead, and who live in India, China, and Azerbaijan. As soon as the work day starts here, my time becomes the property of other people, and I am liable to be called into a spontaneous meeting at a whim. If I want any time of concentration, I have to get up long before sunrise. 3 am sufficed. Then I wanted more time. Now my internal clock is waking me up regularly even before 1 am, and I lie awake until getting out of bed.

I'd wanted to visit the coffee shop which was in the enormous square plaza of shops nearby.  I love the plaza. It is the interior of a block along busy Scottsdale Road at the corner of Shea Boulevard. Unlike the rest of Scottsdale around it, which is cookie cutter on both a residential and commercial level, the plaza dates the post war decades and was built long before its surroundings. The shops along Scottsdale Boulevard, including a dive bar called the Dirty Dogg, face inward away from the road into the enormous parking plaza. The buildings are all differently constructed, side by side, by different developers long ago, giving it an organic feeling like a real city. As I walked around the exterior in the perimeter alley to access the entrance to the plaza yesterday, I smelled the odors of the alley, including the eateries and small immigrant-run restaurants. It felt like Europe. I was carried away to memories of travel, including just last year in small towns in Poland.

I had noticed the coffee shop during my ramblins around the plaza during daytime breaks. There are many salons and nail joints, a few pawn shops, a shuttered tea room, a 50s hamburger restaurant, and an addiction crisis center bookshop that one sees. The coffee shop has a darkened entrance. I had previously peeked inside to make sure that it was indeed a real coffee shop. Finally I went inside for real yesterday. It was expansive and well air conditioned. Everyone else inside the shop looked to be in their twenties. They were all of them on laptops, completely absorbed in their activity. It was a fifty-fifty mix of young men and young women. I was carried back to being in Austin in graduate school. I felt old. I was not he white-haired old guy in the coffee shop. None of them paid any attention to me, but I didn't take it personally. They were absorbed after all.

The bloke at the counter was friendly and made my hot mocha quickly. It cost five dollars and forty cents.  I drew out oa five dollar bill and a one dollar bill out of my wallet and handed it to him over the electronic screen where one would swipe one's plastic payment card. I wondered how often they get cash. The name of the place is "Mythical Coffee."

When I got my mocha, I didn't feel like hanging around inside, so that's when I went outside the little alcove to watch the cars in the big parking plaza. That's when I had the thought, "I feel like I'm already dead." 

It was not a sad thought, not one of mourning, but rather of complete detachment. I felt like like I had already detached from the world, the way one aims to do as a Christian, the way that Father Mike Schmitz talk about in his Cathechism in a Year series on Youtube, which I watch in the wee hours of the morning after rising, and drinking my home-made coffee on the patio. "As we journey together towards our heavenly home..." he always says, in his intro to each installment.

I had the feeling that I was a different person that the one who called himself by my name, and who lived the life I lived. I have the same memories as he does, and inhabit the same body, but so many of the things that used to have deep meaning to that person no longer have meaning to me, at least not in the same way or to the same degree. At the same time I feel an intense love towards those around me, and to everyone I have ever met, and loved, helped, and hurt. 

It was a curious feeling of weightlessness, almost literally, as I sat there. That person--he roamed around Europe almost forty years ago with a backpack. He looked young like those young people inside at their laptops. He is old now. I am him? I hardly know. Who is he? Do I care? Who is left who remembers the man I once was?

Already dead. Not sadness. Liberation. Freedom is the ability to choose what we ought to do, as Father Mike said on today's podcast, Day 233.

When I got home I got a message from one of my friends---of one of the last who will talk to me. The message was brief: "I knew you were close."

It opened it quickly. It was a portrait of someone I know, a woman a few years younger than me, the wife of one of my close friends who lives in Oakland. Above her were vital dates, her. birthday in 1967 and today's date.