A big, empty house in a cold, domesticated forest is one place I go to heal. Of course, no house is entirely empty, and this one contains four cats comprising two warring factions. The members of one faction have long white hair, soft and slick from their spit, and are smaller, generally preferring not to be seen. The members of the other have shorter, coarser hair with mixed dark stripes that seem as if they would have some practical application in the natural world; these cats are larger, less worried, and clearly masters of the house. From my bed I contemplate the tense equilibrium that orders the house, an equilibrium based on each cat, immobile, occupying a separate room.

It wasn't always so. Years ago, when the light and dark cats first met, they fought constantly if civilly, never drawing blood but still arriving at an accord, one in which the dark cats ruled and the light cats didn't. The dark cats' tactics were purely psychological and insidious. A light cat would creep into a room with a dark cat, which would bide her time, lurking around a corner, her hind legs bunched and prepared for rapid propulsion, her neck taut and arched forward, her ears erect, on full alert. Then she would pounce and snarl, not quite tackling a white cat, but producing the same effects—a murderous yell, sudden, overwhelming movement—as those of impending doom. Part Hollywood director and part "Shock and Awe" military strategist, the dark cats never wavered, despite their food-providers squirting water at them and occasional, mild counterattacks from the white cats. Even so, a year passed before the white cats stopped appearing.

The omission of two words in an article on gay marriage in the New York Times sparked a furor that lasted weeks, or a decade in media-years. The quotation was from an interview Bush gave for Diane Sawyer and reads in its entirety: "If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that." In the article in the Times, there was no "If necessary." Starting with Andrew Sullivan, outcry followed outcry, culminating in a piece in the Times itself by its new "Public Editor" Daniel Okrent.

I've been thinking about Okrent's column, in part because it seems to me journalistic narcissism at its most developed; are we to rest easy now that, by paying someone to write about its screw-ups—down to the mundane details of a typo—the Times has finally perfected itself? In this first column, the Times' attempt to seem aware of its failings is like someone talking down his greatness to come off as humble and thus even greater. It's gross. The paper's money would be better spent on internal quality control.

I've also been thinking about the president's calculated use of language. This one quotation is broadly applicable to his administration's policies, which, rhetorically, are ambiguously antigay. It follows the earlier hubbub over Bush's quoting, in reference to homosexuality, parts of the Bible that condemn one sinner who judges another. Bush clearly thinks homosexuality is sinful, even if he won't explicitly say so, just as he thinks marriage is for straights, even if he doesn't have to "codify" it. Such a delicate position enables the president to act one way and seem another. By framing intolerance as indifferent tolerance, it can seem just like tolerance, even like acceptance. The Bush team is onto something that the Times, with its Public Editor, seems to want to mimic in its way: You can get away with anything if you're polite about it.

One’s cousin got through another year, so to celebrate one brunches with her at one’s favorite joint, and it is good. One sits and eyes the menu with pleasure. One waits for the waiter. A man comes with a toothy grin, dark eyes, and a thick, pointy goatee that hangs maybe five inches. He has the facial hair of a Persian charioteer. One cannot help staring at it, talking to it rather than the man.

Finally the man seems to leave. “Nostradamus needs a looksy from the Queer Eye,” one blurts, just as one’s mug fills with coffee by the man, who is standing behind one. One blushes deeply and wonders at what point one became an asshole. One wants to blame something, such as private education. One tries to justify oneself to one’s company, arguing that it is valid to criticize what is chosen and mutable. Then one wants to leave. But one feels one deserves to eat the cold, spit-drenched food, and one deserves to wait an unusually long time for it. Anyway, one has nowhere to go.

Night happens and brings rain with it. One clutches an umbrella and rushes to an appointment. One is crossing the street; it is one’s turn. But a sporty car flies out of nowhere and hits one, knocking one back. “O God,” one blurts. One is not hurt, which the driver could not have known, which may have been why he did not stop. Says a man at a nearby payphone: “Man, I saw that, what a freak!” One resumes walking and thinks that anyone using a payphone these days in the rain surely is an authority on freaks. One notices one is still an asshole. One considers the five inches that were the difference between serious injury and not. One wonders why one’s almost-last words were about God; is one’s secret-inner-core still in love with God, who may or may not drive a sporty car? A man who looks like Nostradamus may know how to curse, it occurs to one, and one thanks God for knowing a drag queen who removes curses, “like genital warts,” she is fond of saying.

Further proof that even righteous eating is deadly: A study in Science suggests that the cancer risk from eating farmed salmon more than once a month—especially salmon from Europe—may outweigh its benefit to the heart. According to the study, ironically, the problem stems from the feed that farmers use, which contains PCB's and other contaminants from pesticides applied over thirty years ago. European salmon are the worst because their feed is most contaminated.

The solution? Wild salmon contain mercury, so much these days that the government advises limited consumption, particularly for children and pregnant women. Packed with the same Omega-3 fatty acids, flax seed oil may provide benefits similar to those of salmon, though Science could be analyzing it now.

Everything happens barely, or barely doesn't.

Three poems haunt me. They aren't necessarily my favorite poems, but I think about them most. I'm not sure what kind of ghosts they are—prophets come back to warn the doomed, souls in need of somewhere to go, or stories made up to scare the stupid. Each is a lament in which the poet seems to try to hide the fact that she is lamenting. Each is about wanting to have more control over the way love works—to tweak love so that it lasts longer, doesn't hurt so much, etc. And each rhymes; rhyming enables haunting.

Of the three, I read "Bright Star" by John Keats first, when I was in high school. The poem is a lot of pretty-talk that, if it came to it, could be cut to the last line in which Keats centrifuges life and death with a dash. Steadfast distance lives, and the volatile moment dies. Keats wants it both ways, like everyone does, so he can live and feel forever. But what I find heartbreaking is the thought that, as a poet, Keats couldn't help but be a star with "eternal lids apart," unable to experience a moment because he felt compelled to write everything down, to make it last. His was the "priestlike task," and the poem an attempt to cast himself as the aching sensualist he probably never was.

The second ghost-poem is Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art". When I read the poem I picture a video of a ragged POW who is reading from a reassuring statement obviously prepared by his captors, giving away the falsity of his words with a crack in his voice at the end. Maybe the image of a dying person putting on a good face for loved ones is more apt. For me, the poem captures the great shock of loss, which is that life continues. A belief in our own importance is an illusion necessary for our survival, and the reality that we and what we love can pass with little notice is too much. The disaster is the fact that we can master disaster, as much as it is that disaster inevitably masters us.

The third is "The More Loving One" by W. H. Auden. Like Keats, Auden uses stars to suggest a distant beauty, and like Bishop, he seems full of tragic bluster as he tries to convince us (and himself) that it's better to be loved less. His case is that the most important thing is the capacity to love, which ultimately renders incidental the object of one's affection. If Madonna dies you move on to Britney. The poem is most dubious at the beginning, when he writes that indifference is the "least/We have to dread from man or beast." Nothing is worse than indifference, the total rejection of being; at least hatred acknowledges existence. Auden also assumes an infinite capacity to love. While some can love vastly, part of everyone shuts down at every loss, as long as the loss—the ghost—can be remembered.

Warren Zevon’s “The Wind” hasn’t left my CD player since Christmas. Zevon died in 9.03 at the age of 56, and he spent many of his last days on the album. His devotion to music at the end seems inconsistent with his outspoken hedonism throughout his life; I picture the guy responsible for “Werewolves of London” parting from the mortal world at a brothel rather than a recording studio. But his life was his art, and so was his death, and you have to admire his authenticity even if you don't like his style.

In his last songs, he comes off as someone who would be great to know and terrible to love. He describes choices he made, people he hurt, fun he had, and his surprise at his final vulnerability. He was a writer who sang, elevating his wiry and sometimes limited voice with his wit and wisdom. My two favorite quotations on the man are in the same interview, given by Jackson Browne in Rolling Stone: “You have to understand—he did what he did to be authentic, to be a writer. He did it with his whole being. It was not a pose. He did things intentionally, that showed he was a showman.” And the other: “These songs of parting and longing—it was a counterpoint to his other thing, charging into the void with a torch and martini.”

He is muscled, tall, and perky, and he is balancing an inflated red ball under his back and holding his arms behind his head as he exhausts himself moving up and down, back and forth. Cross-eyed kids learn from an early age to suspect balls, which can come at you at any time from any angle. Most are soundless. Catching them is out of the question; you just hope not to get hit hard.

But before balls could do me in, a surgeon with bubblegum-flavored happygas uncrossed my eyes. So now, master of balls, I’m arched over one like my friend’s, only mine is smaller and blue. My friend is telling me how to do what he’s doing, and I’m wondering how the hell I got here, and how he got here—to say nothing of the guy with shiny spiked hair and bronzed pores leering at us from a bench in the corner. Shouldn’t my friend be leading a hunting pack, maybe with spiky over there, while my remains fossilize in a bog? Who’s the doctor who uncrossed nature, leaving muscles if only for balls?

If these ridiculous partial crossings are a joke, I get it; if they are a mercy, like giving wheels to caged hamsters, I still think they’re funny.

The first part of training is watching two videos because the trainer thinks television, like it or not, teaches behavior. Mostly women attend training, but this time a young man joins a Chinese woman who quit her job at a bank after 9.11 and a new mother who taught theater to children in Rwanda during the genocide. The trainer's assistant distributes packets with diagrams of the eye and scholarly articles on losing sight with age (shock is normal, they report, followed by anger, sadness, acceptance; however, too much of any of these save acceptance is not). The young man takes notes. The trainer says: happiness is internal, life is a rainbow, the blind are not necessarily deaf, use touch to guide but always ask permission, put things back or they are as good as lost, enable independence, we reimburse your travel expenses. She also says, vision without awareness is not sight.

The point is to talk back usefully.