I have only a month to live, 27 days actually.

Oh, hey!
It's been a long month, I can't tell if it's gone too fast or too slow because my whole sense of time has been altered. First I thought that thirty days wasn't going to be long enough to get everything in order so that when I am gone things will be okay for everybody, but I got all that done in about a week. I met with the bank person and my investment person, I wrote out a really tight little paragraph of explanation that my wife's lawyer wanted detailing the difference between what was going to happen and what the insurance companies would try to frame as suicide. It's not, you know, suicide. It's just the end of things and it's going to be the end of things for me so that some really beautiful simple people can have some of their sense of self back.

Which is the other thing that has been thrown off by this: I no longer have any real sense of self. When the woman at the airport looked at my ID and asked if I was Joe Nation I didn't know what to say for a long time. So I said "Today, I am, tomorrow who knows?" And I smiled and I think she thought I was telling a joke, but I wasn't. That was probably the last real moment of me as a whole, since then I have been dropping little pieces of myself off as I walk or run or swim.

That's what I was doing all day today - swimming. I thought it might be a good idea to get a feel for what eternity was going to be like and since I am going to be spending eternity in the ocean that's where I went- swimming. Swimming didn't slow down my losing my sense of self nor did it restore any of my sense of time. I walked into the water very early in the morning, it was actually kind of dark under the waves and I really enjoyed watching as the sun's light began to shine down through all the coral and the rocks. I watched an anemone fish for it's breakfast. I'm sure that took a while, all those little arms waving, waving, waving. Waving hello or goodbye, I started to ask myself but questions like that don't really have much meaning to me now. All the fish seem to have personalities which is something I've never noticed before, but maybe I wasn't really looking at them, wasn't really concentrating.

Knowing you are doing something for the very last time makes you concentrate better than you can imagine.

I try not to think about that, the doing, hearing, touching, seeing for the last time thing, it makes my head buzz and that last little voice in my head starts to make the same arguments again about living and love and then the insanity thing. You know, about how I'm insane. I'm not and I have the doctor's note to prove it.

I really enjoyed meeting Estelle again, she's been one of our family's pschyes since I was in high school. We had a great meeting up in her office on the 56th floor of the Empire State Building. She asked me a lot of questions. I did my best to answer the questions.

Knowing you are doing something for the very last time makes you answer better than you can imagine.

After all, I said, they lost their world because of what I did, yes, even though I was starving and lost, what I did and what I said destroyed the last little connections between those sweet people and existence. And they have been very fair about the whole thing. Very just. Fair and just, and there is so little of that sort of thing anywhere.

She shook my hand at the end of the session and gave me the note which I have which says I am not insane. I took it with me up to the Observation Deck which I was not planning on visiting but all the elevators arrived on the 56th Floor going up so I took that as kind of a sign.

I watched the sun go down over New Jersey. It looked like a red-hot coin being dropped into a mountain shaped piggy bank. From the South side of the Empire State Building you can look down Fifth Avenue all the way to where it crosses Broadway and then you can follow that beautiful street all the way to the Battery and then you can draw a straight line with your concentrated mind all the way down to where I am now on this little beach at this little table emailing this to Able2Know in the darkness of the early night.

I think it's early, like I said my whole sense of time is off. It was pretty dark when I came out of the water and I thought it was still morning but Eva and the rescue people who had been looking for me all day told me no, it was the night before the night before we go.

Part of me wants to sleep and part of me wants to eat a papaya, there is no part of me which is afraid or sad or angry or any of that kind of thing. Mostly, I feel a sharpness, I find myself struck by the smallest of things. Just a second ago, three pelicans flew by in a perfect formation and one of let out a cry " oowho, ohwhohoo!"

Joe(it was so musical)Nation