The overlap

As the day of the amputation of my right leg draws nearer—just nine days from today—I'm finding that my usual shopping and errands are getting more and more orientated toward my convalescence. I'm buying food in jars and cans or things that can be frozen, like butter. I've replaced all the overhead light bulbs with LEDs, not because of their efficiency (though I love that), but because they last for many years and mounting a chair to change a light bulb when you have one leg is difficult at best, unsafe at worst.
I don't want to tell you how much booze I've purchased. I am not a big drinker, but there's something about the image of a man with one leg, alone, crutching into a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine or something harder that seems so sad that I hope to put that day off for awhile. So I've stocked up.
Meanwhile, the incredible fact that having a leg cut off is being done voluntarily never ceases to stun me. It's not like I've been sentenced in a court of law to have twenty percent or so of my body executed. I could, even in the hospital on the morning of the scheduled operation (February 26th, 2018), simply say, "Forget it," and walk out. 
Then I could buy an airline ticket and head to the opposite coast, which in my case would be California or the Pacific Northwest. 
When I take my walks at dusk I see the contrails of jetliners headed that way. I could be on one of those planes.
If I did so, my chances of dying due to the spread of my condition would go from only twenty-five percent to one hundred percent. With odds like that, it's a little tempting.

Three jetliners head from Philadelphia to points west on a late winter afternoon.

An unreported quote

In 2002 the Complete and Total Loser worked in a branch of a major news agency. Some months after September 11 of the previous year, there was a

Andreas Lubitz

minor incident at the international airport in the Loser's home city. A pilot, angry at the then overly stringent, since relaxed, rules about what you can take on airplanes, was angry at having an object that meant something to him confiscated by airport security.
The story that ran said he had said something threatening and been taken into custody because of it, the flight delayed for several hours as a substitute was found. 
What the pilot said was never reported, but the reporter who covered the incident told the Loser what it was and it was this: "I could crash this plane in my underwear."
That is, as we've all been painfully reminded, to true.