The duty nurse is pretty good-looking, and she contradicts the doctor’s orders—gives me a cup of coffee anyhow, plus a roll, and we’re sitting there quietly, listening to the other doctor and a nurse fixing the guy with the burned forehead. A little human interaction is taking place and my depression is gone as I begin to feel sorry for the guy with the burn, who is explaining that he was up late with insomnia cooking sweet potatoes when the pressure cooker blew. He was going to candy them with brown sugar and eat them at six in the morning and he’s laughing, too, because of the Dilaudid drip. After Linda Ronstadt sings “Just One Look” on the radio, the announcer comes on and says that we’ve set a record for cold—it’s thirteen and a half below at the airport—and I notice that the announcer is happy, too; there’s a kind of solidarity that occurs when suffering is inflicted on the community by nature.

My own thing is the Vincent van Gogh effect. I read where he “felt like a million” after he cut off his ear. It only lasted for a couple of days. They always show you the series of four self-portraits that he painted at different times in his life as his mental condition went progressively downhill. Van Gogh One is a realistic-looking pic, but as life goes on and his madness gets worse he paints Van Gogh Four and it looks as though he’s been doing some kind of bad LSD, which is how the world had been looking to me until I cut my thumb. It gave me a three-day respite from the blues, and clarity came into my life, and I have to remind myself by writing this down that all the bad stuff does pass if you can wait it out. You forget when you’re in the middle of it, so during that three-day break I slapped this note on the refrigerator door: “Richard, you are a good and loving person, and all the bad stuff does pass, so remember that the next time you get down and think that you’ve always been down and always will be down, since that’s paranoia and it gets you nowhere. You’re just in one of your Fyodor Dostoyevsky moods—do yourself a favor and forget it!”