Dead or alive

By Bill Pearse on February 5, 2026 • ( 0 )

Up before the birds, walking in the dark. They say you shouldn’t be alone at the state park when it’s low light with the cougars so I walk in the neighborhood instead. It’s no fun worrying about cougars anyway, looking over your shoulder at every turn.

I come home for an all-cold shower to activate my brain after the yoga, coffee and cardio. By the time I get to 11 I’m ready for a nap.

In the strange film Bugonia that’s up for an Oscar (and spoiler warning if you plan to see it / skip to the next paragraph) there’s a scene with Jesse Plemmons and Emma Stone where he’s got her strapped to a chair and running electrical currents through her brain that’s really hard to watch, because he thinks she’s an alien so he’s testing how much voltage she can take and you think he’s nuts (how could she be an alien, she’s a CEO?), and he’s frying her brain by turning the levels up high but then later the twist is, she really is an alien and so you feel bad for doubting him and thinking he’s nuts. He was just trying to make sense of all his suffering.

I activate my brain with the cold water and get shards of memory cascading down. Like our former hippy neighbor Marv from Pittsburgh who said he’d take all-cold showers too.

Because her office is right by the bathroom my wife has asked me not to take all-cold showers when she’s in meetings because of the sounds I make. Funny how pain and pleasure are processed in the same part of the brain, and sound similar when we’re grunting in pain or ecstasy. (The word orgasm comes from the Greeks, a moment of dying.) The brain balances too much pleasure with a jolt of pain to level it out, but it does the same with too much pain, too: that’s why dopamine gets released in all-cold showers, exercise, or difficult mental tasks. Doing hard things brings rewards.

I’m reading a book about Buddhism and the 12 steps for recovery, each month devoted to a different step, with daily reflections. I just finished January. The steps build in a progression of things you need to accept about yourself and your relation to the substance. I studied the steps a few years ago but had trouble internalizing it. Combine step work with meditation though, and it’s interesting to reflect on why the addict brain resists settling. Why I’m compelled to break the pose and literally can’t sit still. What’s going on in my head?

In the year we bought this house I would drive by it every morning on my way to the vanpool and as the light changed each day I could see the house more clearly from the top of the road. That was our future there, and I couldn’t wait for it. Of course someday we’d bookend that memory with another, sadder version (moving out): but we’d be headed to a different future then, too. Each time I saw our house it made me smile.

The satisfying sound a can of beer makes when it’s cracked open even if it’s NA. That against a tapestry of midwinter birdsong and the first bugs and frogs. It’s a funny jam they have going, the bugs and frogs.

I yanked out more dead stuff from the garden beds, soggy, brown growth from last year. The fallen leaves in the neighbor’s yard were once brown but have now lost all their color and look almost white, like a tarnished penny. Moss spread out everywhere.

Remarkably, I still had the same Bon Jovi song playing in my head for weeks. The meditation hasn’t seemed to quiet the soundtrack in my head. But I’ve always been like that. I tie my shoes funny too, making loops on either side rather than tying them like everybody else. No one has ever noticed, and it works out just fine. Maybe the calm will come with acceptance.