Since May, I’ve been doing writing consultations over Zoom through a public library, which means exposing my unruly shelves to public scrutiny. I know everybody is too polite to say anything about it. But if somebody did, I’ll just tell them what Perec knew all along — a neat library is a dead one, and I’ll accept a little chaos as proof of my living.
From a reporter’s perspective, however, the case bore further investigation — a deep dive, if you will.
So, I procured more than 60 inches worth of Subway tuna sandwiches. I removed and froze the tuna meat, then shipped it across the country to a commercial food testing lab. I spent weeks chatting with tuna experts. I waited, and waited, until the lab results came back.
Here’s what I found.
After nearly two decades of hardcore drug addiction — after overdoses and rehabs and relapses, homelessness and dead friends and ruined lives — Gerod Buckhalter had one choice left, and he knew it.
He could go on the same way and die young in someone’s home or a parking lot, another casualty in a drug epidemic that has claimed nearly 850,000 people like him.
Or he could let a surgeon cut two nickel-size holes in his skull and plunge metal-tipped electrodes into his brain.
I’m 59 and a half years old – and these days I no longer feel that I identify as a human being. I’ve turned into an app. I’m a filter for words. I filter the ways I experience the world.
Juneteenth so a sistah been celebrating. Raise a toast for all those who are melanated. Basking in the beauty of what God created.