When I was younger, I frequently met people who evangelized for universal LSD consumption. A wider perspective, the acid-eaters tried to explain. A benevolent system. They always seemed half-dead to me, some part of them already partaking in the next world, turned away even as they stared into my face and tried to explain. I once watched one of them almost overdose on laughing gas, leering, muttering nastily at my head, his face blue as day. It was indecent, his romance with death. It should have been private. They all just seemed as if they’d willingly trade life for what might be nothing. They seemed infected by the same unexamined certainty as the religious and the insane, mistaking it for some greater ontological understanding.

And then one day I thought I should visit the acupuncturist on Hyperion Avenue. I’d driven past it every day for months. I don’t remember why it suddenly seemed like a good idea. I mean, I remember generally. I was troubled. Things were going wrong. I could produce no reason for it. I thought I might be carrying a backlog of sadness, that it had begun to corrode my life from the inside.

Because I have chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, an autoimmune disorder affecting the peripheral nerves, I’ve had so many venipunctures that the crooks of my elbows are pitted with scars. They look about the same as the scars of my friend who shot heroin for seven years. I’ve had four central lines in my subclavian vein, two on each side. One end tunneled under the skin and then fed into the vein; the other end flopped around on the surface. One of them stayed in for a year. I did six months of the flushing and dressing changes for the line myself. I’ve watched my blood go in and out, lost count of the gallons of other people’s plasma I’ve used, dirtied with autoantibodies, bled back out. I’ve given myself dozens of shots in my legs. All of which is to say that I wasn’t afraid of needles.