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I am given to believe that I look pretty healthy for my age. I also feel pretty good, because over time I have learned what my body likes to consume and what is pleasant to do or avoid. I also feel pretty good because I am comparing my current feeling to how my early-20’s self (who felt pretty bad most of the time) expected I would feel at 36 (much worse). How do I do it?

Vitamins: B’s & D’s for energy etc., and iron because I’m slightly anemic and I navigate using the earth’s magnetic field. Speaking of vitamins, can we talk about hallucinogens? We can’t, really, because a zine is a non-interactive medium, and also the effects of psychoactive drugs are by definition kind of ineffable. However, I would like to recommend (as long as you’re not already on the brink of serious psychological splintering) that you consume psilocybin mushrooms. Start with a small dose and then work your way up, waiting a few months in between each time to digest the experience and reassure your nerd friends or your nerd self that you are fine and in fact almost certainly improved. One of my few regrets is that I waited until my mid-30’s to try them. I really think all of my younger selves could have used a gentle slap upside the inside of their heads.

I make my own coffee pretty much every day and I love it and I look forward to it, but I don’t feel too bad if I don’t have it, as long as I keep moving. That is one of the main benefits of coffee -- it makes you feel like you’re moving even when you’re not. I bike everywhere, but it’s not for fitness, I just hate waiting for buses and trains, and I don’t want to afford a car. I really like zipping through traffic and more or less safely flouting lights and signs, and not thinking about gas, parking, payments, or tickets. I just wish I could give my friends rides.

It has been shown scientifically that social connection is one of the most

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important things for human health, and right now I feel more socially able and stable than any other time in my life. Even the recurring feeling that most people secretly hate me is on the wane. I’ve been making some great new friends, finding new things to talk to old friends about as we all change, and unfollowing goobers on Facebook.

Lately the big changes that I see some of my friends going through on the internet are about making their own families, with partners and children. Many fathers say you cannot be a real man who really knows what life is about until you are a father, and I must say that being a quasi-man living a feeble shadow-life is the thing for me. I can hardly sit through a whole movie, and any child of mine seems like a sequel that the world is not asking for. I am strongly considering getting a vasectomy. What if you could give a pretty decent movie a vasectomy so that it could never have bad sequels that ruin everything?

Religion is another thing that is supposed to be important for healthy living, but apparently that benefit is mostly due to the abovementioned social connection, plus an outlet for the standard existential shrieks. Between my dear friends and mushrooms, I think I got this covered, for now at least. I never felt the faith that the religious people I grew up around seemed to -- I really thought they were all faking it to make God happy just in case he existed, like an emperor’s new clothes situation except the emperor is also invisible so you don’t even get to see him in his underwear. When I found out that they actually believed it, I wanted a new social network, although I didn’t know that phrase at the time. It is possible that I was just born without a normal sense of God-smell, but I sincerely enjoy living without the feeling that someone’s watching us.

If I had to pick a religious or spiritual practice that I adhere to, I would like to

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say that it’s meditation, but it’s actually napping. Besides eating and drinking, naps are one of the few things I do faithfully every day, as if a deity demanded it. Put in 5 minutes to a half hour sometime in the afternoon, and you get a vague dream or two and a renewed sense of possibility.

I used to drink a lot of alcohol and all it did was improve my singing and dancing and sleeping abilities, but now I don’t drink much at all because the hangovers have a nasty spiritual aftertaste -- even after just a few drinks, waking up feels like something the universe would rather I didn’t do. This may be because my liver or my brain finally had their fill, but I also have low blood pressure and sleep apnea -- you could probably murder me with a hot toddy, a warm bath, and a soft pillow. Gratitude is another thing that is said to improve your daily life, and I’m grateful to be alive because it would take very little effort to snuff me out.

A definite sense of your inevitable disintegration can be pretty helpful for feeling good about the immediate future. There is an app for this called Figure 1 that’s like Instagram for medical professionals, so you can scroll through an extremely grievous leg wound from a traffic accident, some innocuous-looking EKG squiggles that actually mean someone’s heart is broken, and an ovarian cyst that grew curly hair and some teeth, all right in a row. I don’t always have the stomach to look at this first thing in the morning, but it is very useful for realizing that (probably) no part of you is disagreeing with the world as badly as it could be. For now, you’re in pretty good shape!

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