Dear Imaginary Julie,

Well, actually, I'm gonna call you just Imaginary  J because I know several actual Julies and you have to be Imaginary Julie or you will get all mixed up in my head with those actual Julies. So you'll just be J. Imaginary J. If that's OK, even though I really like the name Julie just on its own even if I didn't know several Julies and think of them when I say Julie even though, technically speaking, wouldn't you say, they're mostly Julias. I don't think of Julia and Julie being the same at all.

 But anyway, thank you for writing and asking how I am. As you know, I had surgery for a big tumor on my sacrum on Dec. 17 and that kind of thing takes a long time to heal from because they had to cut in from both sides, the front and back, and do all this moving things around to get at it, and then they had to cut off a big piece of my sacrum that the tumor had pretty much destroyed anyway, and then these nerves also got either chopped off or just jostled a lot, leading to some ongoing strangeness in my daily doings, which is mostly what the main job of healing is about, aside from just being weirdly lacking in stamina and generaly like criminally lacking in energy and the like. So my main job is healing. That's what I'm doing with my time. Healing. That's my work. Which is funny because it doesn't look like work. It doesn't look like work to sit around, and then get kind of tired and go lie down. What kind of work is that, moving slow, groaning, resting, taking pills, eating, going to the bathroom, taking forever bathing, taking forever with everything, and getting tired like right away, doing everything slowly, groaning when you get out of the car. And plus being weirdly occupied -- like obsessed actually! -- with the "bodily functions," the eating and elimination. And talking incessantly about the eating and the elimination. And realizing as you do that this is exactly what old folks talk about, and realizing you used to think it was so funny down in Miami to watch all the old folks talk about their fiber and their pills and their operations and their scars, and seeing them lying on the beaches with their scars. And now to realize it's you talking about getting enough fiber, and your operations, and your scars. Now it's you talking about the groceries. Like, don't you want to talk about ideas, or books, or movies, or the revolution that will never, ever come now and probably we don't even want it anymore, it was a silly idea to begin with, one of those youthful enthusiasms.

So the main thing is that with all the pain and weakness and healing I've been on an incredible journey of, like, life and death. And plus both my parents died this year. So it's been just an increadible shifting of my basic relations to the earth, to life. Ya know, J?

But I want to talk about where I am now. OK, so there is this piece I have been writing that, now that I think about it, it's time to get back to, and I can't really talk about this other piece, I just have to go and try to write it, finish it, you know?

J, I wish I had the energy I am used to having. I can definitely say that. And I hope I will, eventually. It's still early. This stuff takes maybe a full year to fully get over, you know? So  I guess I have been a lucky man to have been so healthy and strong all these years, to reach 56 without anything really majorly bad ever happening to me. We're a strong bunch, all the men in my family: not great athletes necessarily, but strong meaning hardy, intense, tough, resilient. We heal fast. We thrive. I figure genetically speaking I come from many generations of men and women  who survived many generations of horrific war. Maybe on the battlefield, too, an ancestor of mine was one of those who healed from his wounds while others died, lying in the muck for days: Healed and crawled back to his village and took a wife and kept the lineage rolling. So I come from that: a long line of warriors healing in the muck while others die around them. You think? You think in my heritage there are the cries and whimpers of warriors dying around me as I lay there healing, getting better, growing stronger so that after a few days I could crawl out of the muck back to the burned village and take up blacksmithing again? You think? I sort of sense it in my bones. But you never know, do you. It could be simply that I think of my life today like that -- that it is my character, so to speak, to be dogged and resilient, to lie there in the muck and try to get better while all around me are the cries of men dying of their wounds. Is that a character thing? Or what? What am I saying?

I'm sure glad nobody is going to read this because it doesn't make much sense and doesn't really put me in a good light, either. It seems like an odd train of thought.

Anyway, the upshot of my writing to you, odd to say, is that in thinking about answering your question about how I'm doing I realized it's time to work on that other piece of writing.

So thank you, imaginary J, for your imaginary letter to me. I'll be back soon to write more to you. Now I'm going to go work on that other thing.

Yours truly,

Imaginary Cary