First off, I'm alive, thanks.

Recent events reminded me that I've always intended to write and store away my own online obituary and leave Susan instructions on how to post it here. I thought it would be a nice gesture to anyone who might come to this page from time to time and wonder why I stopped posting.

Some recent history: on Sunday there was a "house burning" scheduled in a nearby fire district, and I had signed up to go. From time to time a homeowner who intends to demolish a house (and presumably build a new one, or a bunch of McMansions on the same small lot) will allow fire and rescue personnel to burn it down for them in a series of planned exercises. Many firefighters participate because a house burning provides very realistic training in a slightly more controlled environment than a real house fire.

Nonetheless, there's no denying that it is a real house and it's really on fire, and sometimes people get hurt. To my surprise, I was feeling very anxious about the house burning. I was on duty the night before, and had a hard time getting to sleep in rescue squad's bunk room. Every time I would drift off my entire body would experience an electric twitch that shook me awake again. I don't think this had ever happened to me as frequently and repeatedly as it did that night.

When I finally slept, some time after 5 AM, I had an evil and portentous dream. I was standing in a road and hundreds of people were all running past me, fleeing something ahead that I couldn't see. One woman, emaciated and naked, was screaming as she ran, and I caught her around the waist just as she went by. "What is it? What is it?" I asked her, but she ignored me. [Later I realized this image bore an undeniable similarity to the Pulitzer-winning photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack.]

I found myself inside a room in a high rise building. The entire contents of the room had been scoured off by some malevolent force -- only bare, scarred concrete walls remained. I knew people had been in this room just before this happened, but all evidence of them and everything the room once contained had been consumed. My sister was there, wearing a hard-hat as if inspecting the scene of the disaster. I knew she had been outside the building when the monster had filled this room and devoured everything it touched. "What did it sound like?" I asked her. She just shook her head, unable or unwilling to put it into words.

I woke up at seven on Sunday morning and went to get ready for the house burning. I was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding, and wondered if I should back out of the training. As I finished brushing my teeth, I spat out a frightening quantity of blood, and came within a hair's breadth of deciding that this final omen was too much to ignore. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink and wondered how to make a decision like this one. Follow my gut or face my fear?

I won't bother going into more excessive detail about the house burning; maybe some other time under better circumstances. Although I felt a great deal more heat in that house than I ever have before, I emerged without a scratch. I don't at all believe that my dream was a premonition of the coming disasters in New York and DC, but it now looms menacingly in memory all the same. At the time, I was proud that I didn't back down despite an unusually intense fear of being hurt or killed.