Things I Worry About While Lying Awake at Night

Whether my neck bones are fusing together and will cause me constant pain later in my life.

Whether a video can be evil, like in The Ring.

Why cable stations show The Ring in the middle of the night.

Whether I’ll be living in an SRO apartment and eating cat food when I’m 80.

Tsunamis.

Not having earthquake insurance.

How long it would take the radioactive cloud to reach Ashland if San Francisco were hit by a nuclear attack.

Whether the frog in the back yard will park itself outside my bedroom window and ribbit all night.

How long I would be on crutches if I blew out my ACL playing tennis.

Whether I would cut my foot on a rock if I went outside right now and tried to shoo away the frog.

Whether the arthritis in my right hand will get so bad that I’ll have to write with the left one.

Whether I would puke onstage if I ever got to do a poetry reading at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City.

Whether that was someone’s brakes or a far-off scream.

Whether a baby and a tumor are essentially the same thing—a batch of cells grown crazily out of control so they sap our strength and crowd out our internal organs, but the tumor never grows a face and a brain and hair and fingernails, unless tumors actually do have these things and we just don’t know it.

Whether frogs get cancer.

Whether we keep the frogs awake.