I was going to tell you about overdrawing my checking account and talking to a nice lady from Montana on my cellular telephone about it, about how I saw my hairdresser today, and how we always talk about death in only the most cheerful ways as she snips artfully at the mass of dead cells tethered to my head. How I walked around Soho and ran into someone I knew from college who I hadn't seen in four years but have run into twice in the last two weeks in two different cities and we did not talk about death, how we instead talked about the quasi-sexual undertones of the conversations we have with the rich New York parents to whom we provide various services. How as we discussed this we sat on the street in the unseasonable warmth at a natural foods restaurant, how I ordered scrambled tofu and he left to see a casting director. How as we talked the 6 train rumbled just below, audible through the vent, how we ignored it as we all must ignore the constant rumbling that accompanies our daily lives, even as it rattles the pictures on our walls. How as I enjoyed my alfreso meal I was attended to by no less than three Latin American busboys and an aging hipster waiter, how I ate my scrambled tofu with brown rice and mesclun greens and drank my fair trade Peruvian coffee and read the Talk of the Town. How I walked up the block repeating portions of the conversation I had last night with my Ecquadorian cabdriver, practicing the pronunciation. How when I blew into the dispatch office of the car service last night to ask for the cab my umbrella had turned inside out in the warm rain, and how I righted it and held it over both of our heads as we ran to the luxury car I had chartered to take me home to North Brooklyn. How he asked point blank if I liked America and I answered that I liked some things about it, and he said "like the natural things, the mountains and rivers and ocean and land" and I said, yes, yes, but I do not like the government and I do not like the president and I do not like the war, and how pleased I was that I could say everything I needed to say and in Spanish no less, and somehow the rudimentary simplicity of my poor command of the language did not impoverish my meaning but enrich it, and then I said exit here at Exit 32 turn right at the light and go three blocks and then turn left and here is where to stop, please, and I had slipped into the place where the pleasantries of another language come to you without too much effort, the thank you's and nice to meet you's and good evenings and goodbyes.

The woman in Montana was so nice about it, so reassuring. She assured me that I was in very good standing with the bank and of course I had only made a miscalculation (I did not tell her my miscalculation invovled a $120 shopping spree at a discount liquor warehouse), and since this was my first offense it was quite likely that the overdraft charges could be reversed and she had no doubt that as soon as I was paid after the first of the month I would certainly restore a postivie balance to my account, and I marvelled to her that negative balances are in fact depicted in red with negative signs in front of them, just like I use to teach negative numbers to the kids whose parents, who apparently haven't paid me enough to maintain a postive, black balance in my account, to quite literally keep me in the black, as it were, and she was so kind and oblivous, she asked if Brooklyn was in the metropolitan area or was it in upstate New York and since she had been patient with me I was patient in return and explained the difference between the five boroughs, the metropolitan area and "upstate." "I've never been to the East Coast," she said, "and I'm here in Montana." "Come to the East Coast," I wanted to implore her, come and we will drink exotic martinis mixed with top-shelf vodkas, you must have some passwords or access to funds there at your terminal in the telemarketing facility, there must be money that will not be missed, and we seem to be two people of like mind, come and I will take you to meet a hairdresser who is also a shaman and I will interpret your opinions to cabdrivers as best I can, and we will have such a time, overdrawing someone else's checking account here in the metropolitan area.

I was going to tell you all of these things, but they seem so irrelvent now.

A little something I wrote is available for your reading on the website of Venus Magazine.

It was a New York weekend, bracketed by the purchasing of beautiful, frivolous shoes at ridiculously low prices. On Friday I bought a pair of sandals made of the thinnest straps of the softest suede in the palest pink, criscrossed with ribbons and lined with metallic silver leather, telling myself that they were an absolute necessity for my friends' summer wedding. On Sunday I bought a pair of knee-high black velvet boots embroidered in their entirety, including their medium height, perfectly shaped heels, with a tapestry of rainbow-colored flowers, telling myself that they were an absolute necessity for New Year's. In purchasing these shoes, I experienced all the ecstasy of a both literally and metaphorically sexual nature normally attributed to women buying beautiful, frivolous shoes at ridiculously low prices.

I cooked haphazardly for my boyfriend in my ill-equipped kitchen. I cooked him imperfect ravioli and structurally unsound omlettes. In cooking these imperfect ravioli and structurally unsound omelettes, I experienced all the feelings of anxiousness to please, shy pride and a desire to nurture of both a literally and metaphorically sexual nature normally attributed to women cooking for their boyfriends in their ill-equipped kitchens.

We shopped for winter coats in used clothing stores. The dust and mold in the used clothing stores gave us allergies that ranged from mild (mine) to severe (his). The winter coats in the used clothing stores had imperfections that ranged from the synthetic fur on their hoods having been tumble-dried against manufacturer's recommendations and fused together like dreadlocks to sleeves that were too short. I bought an enormous yellow rain slicker and my boyfriend bought a thermally-lined hooded sweatshirt in an army surplus store on a tumbledown street in a part of Brooklyn that used to house a booming martime industry and will soon house 40,000 new residents in luxury high-rises. In envisioning these 40,000 new residents riding the elevators of their luxury high-rises up into what was now only sky, I experienced all the rage and sadness of a both literally and metaphorically primal nature normally directed by the earlier gentrifiers of a place toward the final wave of gentrifiers who destroy everything that was either literally or metaphorically real about it.

We dined out finely with the two friends I have known for half my entire life. I realized that when I first met these friends, one in the seventh grade and one in the summer after the eighth grade, I didn't realize that I was only half as old, half as wise, half as dumb, half as defeated, half as brave, half as optomistic as I would be at some later date. We spoke of the future in terms just as vague. Maybe we would formalize our association as a publishing company named after the nearest subway stop, all get famous and be forever remembered. Maybe when we were twice as old as we were now we would all be rich enough to fight over who would get to pay the bill. Yes, maybe we would be rich and famous, with well-equipped kitchens in a time not too far from now, when this neighborhood consisted entirely of luxury high rises. In dining finely and talking of our adolesence and dreaming grandiosely of the future, I felt the strange nostalgia for the present moment of a both literally and metaphorically heartbreaking nature normally attributed to people dining finely with their oldest friends and newish loves.

My mother interns once a week at a women's health and birthing center in the South Bronx. She's getting a doctorate in the psychology of pregnant women, new mothers and newborn babies and this is the practical component of her work. Like everyone I know who is in training to be a health care professional, she practices on poor people. Luckily, the people I know who are practicing to be health care professionals on poor people are caring, competent, gifted healers, and though they don't bring much experience to their professions yet, they are bringing other qualities to their art--compassion, focus, respect for their patients. From what they tell me, these are qualities that their more experienced superiors do not always share. But still, it strikes me as odd and yet perfectly appropriate to the society we live in that poor people are the patients everyone learns on and that when you can pay more money you never have to be someone's learning experience.

My mom sees lots of patients whle she's at the center on Tuesdays. Her work is to counsel women through the experience of conception, pregnancy, chlildbirth, postpartum and the ways all of these experiences can become challenging or even devastating--unwanted pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, ambivalence about motherhood, depression, memories of childhood sexual abuse. I'm very proud of the work she does. When she describes to me the issues she helps women face, my mind boggles. I can't imagine delving into someone's life at a level deeper than his or her upcoming Regents exams. I can reassure my clients that none of this really means anything and mean it. All it takes is a little deprogramming and me and the kid are joyously railing against the System in no time. But to be with a woman grieving the loss of a pregnancy and accept that you have no solution to offer her except time, love and compassion? To find strength in situations in which we are inherently helpless? That is a calling, not a day job. It is one my mom is perfectly suited to. She is one of the most understanding people in the whole world. I think the women she sees come back because when they talk to her they feel, as I have always felt, understood.

My mom once articulated her mission in the work that she does now as to love all the humanity in all the women and children that she works with. I like that she says "love" and not "respect" or "serve" or "honor." Healing is an act of love, not a commodity or a service. I think that understanding, not in the form of comprehension, not in the repugnant articluation of "tolerance," but as love, as the understanding that however a human being suffers and whatever has happened to them and whatever they desire and fear and feel is not so farfetched from what you yourself suffer and experience and desire and feel--this understanding is how a person can help to heal another person. A person who sees another person as a problem to be solved or a broken body or malfunctioning machine will never be able to heal.

But while we may understand and love all people at a deep human level, there are still differences that appear to separate us. While my mom is very well prepared to understand her patients as people, she is not as well prepared to understand their vernacular. Some say that this means she can't truly understand her patients, that they will not feel understood by someone with whom they do not share a lot of subcultural common ground, but I think that with a little understanding, that gap can be bridged. It just takes a few learning experiences. Observe:

The receptionist at the women's health and birthing center came in to my mom's office and asked if she would mind staying later to fit in an extra patient. "She's just not feeling the baby," said the receptionist.

"She's not feeling the baby?" said my mother. "She needs to see the midwife or the doctor right away!"

"No, no," said the receptionist. "She's just not really feeling it. The baby."

"I know," said my mom. "But she doesn't need to see a therapist. She needs to see if something is wrong with the baby."

"Nothing is wrong with the baby," said the receptionist, "she's just not feeling it."

When the receptionist realized my mother didn't know that meaning of the expression "to feel" she told the entire office about it and everyone laughed.

"I felt so ignorant," said my mother as she told the story over Rosh Hashanna dinner. "I didn't know what to say, except I'm sorry, I'm really..."

"Old and white?" my uncle finished helpfully.

"I guess so," said my mother sadly. "I guess that's what I am."

I understood.

You would like to believe that the panic attack you had in Soho had nothing to do with the bridesmaid's dress you selected moments before. You would like to believe it had nothing to do with the teapot you were currently trying to pick out. You have had relatively few panic attacks in your life; this was only the second one that was not drug-induced. You are surprised by how cheesily cinematic it is--the visual and sound effects used to convey the idea of panic in movies and television, are not, as you had thought, a kind of shorthand for a panic attack but completely accurate to the symptoms of panic as they occur in reality. And yet the panic attack is like a movie, in the sense that you are watching it. From the part of you that observes everything, even your greatest ecstasies and most deepest despair, you are watching what is going on in your body and mind with cool remove. You have tried to eradicate this part of you with art and alcohol and drugs and meditation and even at times, extreme pain, so you can have some kind of pure experience, some kind of experience unmediated by consciousness, which you a realize is a paradox since it is through consciousness that we apprehend experience, creating another paradox since the apprehension of experience, in the sense of the multiple meanings of the word "to apprehend" (1. to take into custody, arrest; 2. to grasp mentally, understand; 3. to become conscious of, as through emotions or senses, perceive) is exactly what you both desire and do not desire. You desire to (#3) become conscious of, as through emotions or senses, but you do not desire to arrest experience (#1), and yet through trying to grasp mentally and understand experience (#2) you cause the first, undesirable effect of apprehension and prevent the desirable third.

You are dimly aware of these contradictions and possibilities, even momentarily distracted by them, as you try to apprehend your apprehension of experience, which has most recently and unexpectedly, in the midst of an aisle of different sized ceramic teapots in Pearl River Mart, ceased to be the normal apprehension of experience and become instead the experience of apprehension (1. Anxious or uneasy anticipation of the future; dread; 2. The act of seizing or capturing, arrest; 3. The ability to apprehend or understand, understanding).

You are feeling the first, but not really the second or the third effect of your apprehension. You are filled with anxious and uneasy anticipation of future, both the immediate future in which you will select a teapot, and the later future in which you will make tea in this teapot and continue to live in what at this moment seems will be an unending state of anxiety. You are engaged in the act of seizing or capturing, but it is not you who is doing the seizing, it is you who has been seized. You are in the midst of some kind of arrest, here among the ceramic teapots. It occurs to you that if you were to crumple to the floor, or perhaps slump to the floor (you actually pause in the midst of your arrest to consider whether you would crumple or slump to the floor, the running narrative in your head requiring the same careful selection of words as the one in your notebooks), you would jostle and perhaps break some of the teapots, that they would crash and clatter and shatter, and that this, too, would be an appropriately cinematic effect to go along with the rest of this cliched experience. You are disappointed with its hazy edges and wobbly camera work and vertiginous warping of the simple shapes of the teapots and bowls and plates and other ceramic objects and the slow-motion demonic sound of the tinkling Chinese music in Pearl River Mart and now, now you are grasping at the neck of your jacket, you are ripping open the snaps at your neck, and the sound is so loud, it is exactly the kind of sound that would be amplified in some kind of television or movie post-production, the sound of the snaps ripping open as the character who is having the panic attack gulps for air and grows dizzy with heat and perhaps even spins around and--how do these attacks even end? They usually pass out, and come to later in a comical fade-in that leads to a revelatory denouement within the hour.

But you are not going to pass out. Nor does it feel like a revelation is on the horizon. You are wide awake and beginning to realize that you will be neither selecting nor fainting upon a teapot in Pearl River Mart today. You will get some air, and maybe this will apprehend the apprehension, the anxiety and dread you are feeling about your future of anxiety and dread. You have looked up the symptoms of panic attack on the internet before and you know that fear of a permanent state of madness is one of the symptoms. "The fear that I feel of a permanent state of madness is only a symptom," you tell yourself, "and if I can accept this fear as a temporary symptom of--" and then you are stuck. A symptom of what? Why would you fear a permanent state of madness and anxiety if it were not a real possibility? And why wouldn't you have reason to fear a permanent state of madness and anxiety if madness and anxiety were not the defining features of the current moment, which like all current moments, seems quite eternal? "Everything passes," you remind yourself. "We are all just passing through time and it is passing through us." This thought, which you normally find quite comforting and interesting which occupies you for blocks and blocks while you walk through the city and comforts you when your anxiety and dread and painful excitement at the fact that you are alive is at more manageable levels than it is right now, is, in your state of apprehension, terrifying. It is not unlike the first moment as a small child that you consciously realize that you are going to die, but more visceral. Because now you have moved into second and third actions of the verb "to apprehend," you both comprehend as an idea and are having as an experience the notion, the fact, the possibility, the reality of fear and death, your own and that of all your loved ones, which if it is not happening right now, or hasn't happened without your knowledge, will happen, sometime sooner or later, and it there is no good way to be ready for it, all the death, and the acute fear of it you will live in until it comes for you and everyone you love, none of whom can save you from this fear.

And yet it is not as grand as all this. "Fear" and "death" don't enter into the vocabulary of the detached narration that is describing this movie to its sole director, actor and spectator. As you walk up Broadway, "getting some air," which you realize has not had the desired effect of arresting your apprehension but instead has simply turned you into a slightly cooler person having a panic attack, you are not thinking about fear and death. You are thinking instead of how odd it is that you never noticed before how loud and frightening the horns and sirens of New York City are, how mean and scary the faces of people are, how grotesque the headless mannequins in every store window are. You pass by a store whose mannequins aren't completely headless, but rather have heads that are severed at various angles, so one mannequin has a mouth and one eye and another a flat round cross-section right above the nose, and you remark to yourself what an unfortunate set of mannequins that is for a person having a panic attack to come upon.

You have a sense that the subway might not be the best place for a person in the throes of a panic experience. It is underground and claustrophobic and loud and full of rush-hour commuters. On the other hand, you think rationally, it's warm and safe and a little more sensory-deprived then the very overwhelming street. The subway will take you to 14th Street, and it's always good to be on 14th Street because then you are nearly home. (One of your theories of New York City is that the subway line you live on is an extension of your concept of your neighborhood, so that if you ride the L train, really all of 14th Street is your neighborhood.) The subway, you think rationally, really isn't safe, you are always a little afraid of terrorism on the subway, it seems inevitable and the fact that they keep warning everyone about it and yet it hasn't happened yet makes it seem particularly ominous and inevitable, but right now, in the midst of severe and unnamable terror, a terror that comes from within you and encompasses everything, you are able to see that the terror of terrorism is a mere diversion from the terrors that lie within us, coiled like snakes and waiting to strike in the middle of the teapot aisle.

You go down the subway stairs and wait for the train. You sit on the bench, quivering with the terrible secret of your madness. Is this what it's like for the mentally ill, of which you are temporarily one, all the time? Do they sit on the subway bench and feel not alienated or cynical or angry or left out or bummed out or smug but simply in a constant state of apprehending the horror of life and its impending end and all the time that lies between now and then in awareness of this end? How terrible for them. You would feel empathy for them if you were not so currently worried about becoming one of them.

You notice more symptoms of panic. Tingling, numbness, nausea, heartbeat. You take your pulse and it is very fast. Is it tachycardic? Does tachy mean fast? You think it means fast. "My pulse is tachy," you say to yourself. "I am a textbook case of whatever I am having," you think. You are mildly comforted. You know what this is. There are words for it. And suddenly you feel a feeling you haven't felt in the last half hour--comfort. You are beginning to pendulate out of it. Pendulation is a neurological term you know. It means that what goes up must come down.

The subway comes and you not thrilled by its rumbling but you can get on it. You are still terribly afraid, but you are not so apprehended in the moment. You are thinking that maybe, when you catch your breath, you can get groceries like you planned, (though not the tea, you won't be needing the tea, since you still don't have a teapot). You and everyone you love are going to die but that is once again just an idea, not an all-encompassing reality. You don't apprehend that idea quite so much anymore, and by consequence it doesn't apprehend you. That idea is going back to wherever it lives and lurks and lies dormant in you when it is not causing panic attacks in the teapot aisle. The you that watches is no longer a leader in exile, watching from a secret location in your consciousness as a demon impostor wreaks havoc your physiology. The you that watches over everything is ushered back to her command center, she touches the items on the desk possessively and habitually, she pulls some switch and releases the knots of your muscles, she eases off the tacky special effects and slows your tachy heart.

The last thing you remember thinking about before this all began was how many adjectives went with your bridesmaid's dress. The bride chose some of them: the color (burnt sienna) the length (knee) the trim (bow band) the color of the trim (pomegranate for you and her sister, the maid and matron of honor) and you chose the rest: size (6) style (empire waist) neckline (strapless). You were feeling quite pleased with your decisiveness and sentimental about the June wedding. The fear of death had not come for you yet in the fitting room, where you frowned and said "no" to spaghetti straps, nodded "yes" to the empire waist. You smoothed the fabric of the sample dress and eyed your reflection with pleasure. The dress looked nice on you. How nice that you like your body enough to enjoy it, how nice that you grew out of the body hatred that still afflicted so many women out there on the street in Soho, how nice that your body is not grotesque to you. You thought of how you would wear this dress in the pictures, and the pictures would go in the wedding album, and the wedding album would be saved for years and years, maybe be passed on to the children and grandchildren of this incipient marriage. The camera would click on a moment still in the future, the moment you were buying this dress to create, and it would freeze it in time and maybe in many years you would celebrate this couple's fiftieth anniversary and you would look at the picture and think how young you were once and how old you were then, and even later some descendent of your engaged friends might see you in the wedding album, flanking the bride, and not even know who you were, but just think, as you sometimes think when you see an unidentified person in an old photograph, how you were once pretty and now you must be long dead. But this thought did not give you vertigo, in the dressing room where the fear of death had not come for you yet, in fact it gave you pleasure. You were so glad to be here at all, so glad that you were here in the now that would become the then, that you were in the process of buying a dress that would seem hopelessly dated in thirty years and then in a hundred, if the pictures survived, perhaps historic, when now it was the most typical of fancy dresses. You took pleasure in not being able to predict what would seem dated or eventually archaic about it, pleasure in the fact that the opinions on bridesmaid's dresses of the aughties are yet undecided, pleasure in the frivolity of a pretty dress, pleasure of the absurdity of a soon-to-be lawyer, a summer associate, a magna cum laude Phi Beta Kappa on two kinds of law review playing princess and pleasure in cynical feminist you playing her lady-in-waiting and everyone enjoying it. You took pleasure in simply being there, in dressing for the occasion, in being part of it.

The showroom was full of dresses in every style and color, hung on racks in rainbow order. There was one concept of the dress--a cylinder of silk--and then so many permutations on it. How it was sewn, the parts of a woman it displayed and concealed, the geometry of the neckline and the skin it revealed, the difference between translucent fabric and fabric that shimmered. Lately you are interested in editing, how the addition or subtraction of any detail changes a work of art, and were mindful of this as you considered the rainbow of dresses hanging on racks. You observed how each detail changed the dress. You hoped to learn something.

You observed how the dresses posed a math problem, but it could be solved quite easily. You thought happily how you knew how to calculate how many permutations of dress there were, how with six types of fabric and ten sizes (plus maternity dresses for pregnant bridesmaids) and four styles and three lengths and four necklines and six trims and twenty-seven colors there was a large but still finite number of possible dresses. But within the choices already made for you, there were eight possible dresses, and you tried them all on. You thought, in the showroom as you made your selection, before you were suddenly apprehended by apprehension, that you were doing very well.

Among my notably paint-spattered articles of clothing, the white undershirt with the brown paint is probably the least evocative. My army pants are smeared with all the colors of our current apartment; the red streak on my one pair of shorts matches the wall in the hallway. In a closet full of sentimental clothing (My lucky bra from the SATs, the jeans I was wearing the first time I kissed a boy, the remnants of the Indian print blouse I medtatively shredded into pieces while tripping on mushrooms, the thermal sweatshirts my parents were wearing in the fall of 1970), the white undershirt lies forgotten in the pile of old clothes I mean to use for rags, evoking nothing so much as a time when I believed it was extremely fashion-forward to wear a white v-neck men's undershirt and $15 secondhand Levi's bought on a thrilling trip via the Long Island Rail Road to Antique Boutique. (The irony of scoffing at this outfit is not lost on me, as I sit here typing in a white tank-top men's undershirt and a pair of $125 not-secondhand-but-distressed-enough-to-appear-that-way Seven jeans. Plus ca change...)

I wore the white v-neck undershirt sometime last week and washed it earlier today, and as I sat folding it on my bed, enjoying the mindless task of pulling pieces of cloth from the pile of laundry, enjoying the illusion that I can impose order upon chaos, I suddenly remembered where the brown paint came from. It's the same brown paint spattered in smaller quantity on the cuff of those very $15 secondhand Levi's. I saw the brown paint flying from the brush, the late-afternoon late-summer sun glistening on the surface of the paint in the can, smelled the cabins, musty and sweaty and male, smelled the paint, sticky and sharp, smelled the trees, sweet and heavy and still in the slow motion of August. The paint was flying from the brush in some kind of aggressive jest, it flew from the brush onto my t-shirt and jeans and tonight as I folded the t-shirt and smoothed the brown paint, now melded to the cotton so thoroughly that it no longer forms a stiff patch on the fabric, I felt the indignant thrill of that fliratious gesture, the twitch of what I now recognize as sex in all its forms and intimations, as vividly as if it were now and not a decade ago.

I had been walking around the camp in the long hours of early summer evening, probably hoping to see some boy I liked especially (there was always some boy I liked especially), and I had come upon him painting, not the boy I liked especially, but some other boy, who I remember as impossibly old to me then but who was probably younger than I am now, and I had slumped into an Adirondack chair nearby, I can feel it's harsh angle on the hollow of my lower back right now, and pulled my knees up to my chest and we had started talking to one another, while he repainted the outside of the brown cabin a slightly darker shade of brown. I didn't know him very well and we hadn't talked a whole lot before that, but for some reason on this late afternoon we had a long talk, and I can now see the dried-out leaves caught in the spaces in the cinderblocks that held up the cabin he was painting, and maybe he wasn't wearing a shirt, as boys who paint in summer often don't, and maybe as I felt the harsh angle of the Adirondack chair on the hollow of my own lower back I could see the sweat collecting in the hollow of his, darkening the waistband of his pants as he crouched to dip the brush in the paint and turned to me to say something that caused me to unfold myself from the Adirondack chair and say something that caused him to flick his paintbrush at me, maybe not hitting me at first which caused me to yelp or shriek or simply say "hey!" and him to do it again, splattering my shirt with paint, and the two of us to lunge at each other in mock aggression, and him to chase me with the paintbrush, and I don't remember if he chased me around for a while, as people sometimes did, threatening to spray other people (usually girls) with hoses or overturn water pitchers on their heads, or slosh them with buckets full of slip, or imprint them with fingers full of silkscreen ink (it was an art camp), I don't remember if he chased me far enough to get me winded, or if it ended with one of those immature wrestling matches or an inadvertant injury (in another such hormonal fight I had thrown a piece of carrot cake from the bedtime snack table with such accuracy that the boy suffered cream-cheese frosting in the inner ear), or if I escaped, breathless and giddy. I don't remember what we talked about, or even who exactly he was, I remember only the paint flying from the brush and the sense of crazed alertness, the addictive realization that there was some way to feel more alive than you normally did, some peculiar alchemy that could cause you to feel like you were going to jump out of your skin or take flight or spectacularly evaporate, and it had to do with a quickening of breath and a widening of eyes and a boy with no shirt and sweat collecting in the hollow of his lower back threatening you with a paintbrush.

Last night at 1:30 a.m. I called up a Fry's Pharmacy in Arizona and asked, "Why wouldn't you provide the morning-after pill to a rape victim who needed it?" I did this because I was instructed to do at the end of a free newspaper sex advice column that counted among this week's topics: How to spot a diaper fetishist in your workplace. But of course, Savage Love is so much more than a syndicated alternative newspaper sex advice column, it's one of the few repositories of sanity in an increasingly insane world, which is why when Dan Savage says, "Call this pharmacy in Arizona and yell at them," I do so.

What is a Fry's anyway? Is that like a WaWa or some other exotic retailer located in a State That Is Not New York? Last time I was out west I noticed a chain of roadside convenience stores pornographically called the Kum & Go. In Chicago when you need ice for a party or a quart of milk you go to The White Hen. Why are the names of conveninence stores so mysterious and state-specific and why do teenagers like to hang out in front of them so much, and why is it always the ones with the strangest facial hair who do? And what, exactly, is a pharmacist? A pharmacist, as far as I can tell, is a drug dealer in a polyester vest who sells all the wrong drugs for the worst kind of corporate druglords. Seinfeld pointed out that the pharmacist stands on a platform that puts him three inches higher than everyone else, really for no reason at all.

Maybe the three-inch elevation in the pharmacist's status has led to an unwarranted superiority complex, because some pharmacists have taken it upon themselves to deny women the medicines they need to make the choices that are nobody's business but their own. These pharmacists claim that they should be able to refuse to dispense the morning-after pill if it goes against their religious beliefs. Even if, as in the case of the Fry's pharmacy, the store stocks the drug. If the pharmacist on duty believes that the morning-after pill constitutes an abortion and therefore doesn't want to dispense it, they can refuse to do it. So if you're going to get raped, please have the decency to do it when a heathen pharmacist is on duty. Because you can only exercise what rights are still available to you in this country when the whims of your government--and now your local pharmacist--permit.

And if God forbid you just want to have consenual sex, which is what really makes you a whore in the eyes of the pious, well, if the man in the polyester vest thinks you should suffer the consequences of your sinful acts, then Ye Shall Bear the Child of Your Profane Union. Because the only person I'd rather invite into my bedroom and my pants more than the Bush Administration is the local fucking pharmacist.

The number of Fry's pharmacy coprorate offices (to whom they are referring all complaints about their willingness to employ a pharmacist who would not dispense the legal drugs they stock to a rape victim) is (623) 907-4932. The other company who allows their pharmacists to rewrite the law according to their private religious beliefs is Target.

Religous beliefs=private. Women's bodies=public. Sounds like America to me.