Parts of me fit together poorly. I am somewhat loosely constructed from poor materials. A rickety quality, a let's-throw-this-fellow-together-any-old-way feel. For instance my jaw. I've always known this about my jaw, my jaw problem, but I never let myself stop and think about it for too long because it would only make me crazy. My lower jaw has only a glancing familiarity with my upper jaw, my upper jaw and my lower jaw dance near each other but never really with each other, in the contemporary style, and so my lower teeth only rarely come into contact with my upper teeth, except when I'm eating peanut brittle, which I never eat, or when my face is frozen in a clench of emotional agony, which it only occasionally is now that I've become an alcoholic. Either my lower jaw is misaligned with my upper jaw or my upper jaw is misaligned with my lower jaw, or both, or that's a meaningless distinction, I don't know I'm not a jaw expert. Something is off, something is misarticulated in relation to the other thing. For some reason my brain decided to start thinking about my jaw problem this morning and it hasn't stopped and I can't make it stop. I can't make my brain stop doing anything, ever, although once my brain drops a theme or topic and moves on to something else I tell myself it was my doing, that I triumphed over my brain in a tense battle of wills, that my dogged persistence is the reason why. I call these poignant delusions my Phantoms of Volition, and they are very dear to me.

My intense jaw awareness has been very distracting today. My crappy jaw hinges are Sunday's obsession. Thousands of years from now archaeologists will unearth my jawbone from a hillside in Montana and draw certain conclusions about what sort of individual I was, my role in society, my primitive abilities and so on, my facility with tools, and they will surely not fail to notice, with professional tenderness, the marked imperfection of my jaw alignment and generally ramshackle construction, and wonder what manner of cruel stigma or outsider status this conferred on me in my rigid and backwards early human culture. I should leave them a note informing them that the jaw thing was really no big deal, but there were other things.