Dear Reader

[Buff]

I'd hoped to sit down today and distill a life's worth of hard-learned lessons into a series of witty yet heart-tugging epigrams. The tone was meant to be light, almost whimsical, but woven around the reminders to floss daily would be threads of great wisdom and golden advice. You know, one of those posts that gets linked around the Internet and, invariably, through the alchemy of e-mail gets falsely attributed to a famous author. Say, maybe Nicholson Baker at a commencement ceremony.

And at some point, the confusion gets so entrenched that the famous author is forced to issue a gracious demurral, one that expresses some admiration for the post's homespun wisdom but also subtly asks how his true fans could think him capable of such obvious treacle. Soon enough, Moby puts an edited version of the piece over a haunting musical bed and a professional voiceover talent is asked to read ludicrous nuggets like, "Always remember your first love, if not his face or name, then the intensity which accompanied your longing, and make of all your loves...a first love."

And to be fair, I did start that post. I had this little riff about how the vibrations of an electric toothbrush get communicated through the dense bone structure and end up tickling the most sensitive parts of your nose, but I advised you to use one anyway. (Whimsy!) And then I gently urged you never to go to bed mad at your spouse, if only because it's so much fun to stay up late fighting. (Serious, but with a smirk.) Finally, I attributed the whole mess to an Erica Jong graduation speech and sent it to a host of friends. So far, nothing. Not a ripple.

Perhaps I learned too late that the beauty of these posts is they assail our priorities without making us defensive. If you tell someone to spend more time with his grandmother, you're effectively saying he's neglecting her now (and that he'll regret it someday). But somehow these posts, instead of making us furious with their presumption, encourage in us a desire, one lasting four to five minutes, to lead better, fuller lives. And they do it by reminding us to "remember what's truly important in life."

And by that they mean that family must always come before career, friends before status and love before all. And it's great advice. Everyone agrees with it. But almost no one does it. Why? Because we're not meant to. We're meant to be entranced by the ephemeral, the superficial, the nonsensical. It's how we survive. It's what keeps us all singing in the shower. Trust me on this. Urging your message board readers to live constantly at the heart of pure emotional awareness is to wish them suicidal. And no one needs that particular forward.

I suppose some people live always attached to life's enduring truth, but most have experienced some horror I wish you to avoid. Perhaps they walked away from a plane crash or awoke from a three-year coma. And something about their experience has left them permanently tethered to "importance." But for all their sincere gravity, they're still the bearded ladies of life's emotional carnival. People avoid them when they can, and view them with a mixture of pity and curiosity when they cannot. They're freaks, dear reader, and most end up in cloistered sects, institutions or dumpsters.

Look, it's a lot like watching a football game when an interior lineman falls motionless to the ground. An apprehensive hush washes over the crowd and even the boozy announcer says, "Well, something like this really puts things in perspective." And, true, some part of your mind is urging him to stand, or solemnly envisioning his wife's forced introduction to respirators, catheters and colostomy bags. But the other part of your mind is saying, "Hey, what's this 12-minute delay going to do to my team's momentum? We were finally starting to move the ball."

And it's important not to feel bad about that. You're not alone. We'll all be cheering for an especially vicious crack-back block within five minutes. And that's okay, too. It's how we keep going. By avoiding "importance" when we can, and wrestling with it when we must. Because you will have to wrestle with it. When you're young, you're most often reminded of the important things in life when illness or tragedy visits those near you. As you grow older, you're reminded when they visit you. And visit you they will. More often than you wish. And when they come, they will leave shaken and scared and resilient and stronger. But don't go looking for them. Instead, while you can, concentrate on building a really good CD collection.

In case you haven't been browbeaten enough about your lapsed priorities, these message board ditties always end with a reminder that no man on his deathbed ever wished he'd spent more time at work. Well, that's probably true. I'm guessing no man on his deathbed ever wished he'd spent more time shampooing either, but that doesn't make it significant. (Nor does shampooing lend itself to weighty aphorisms.) The subtext here is that nearness to death gives us nearness to truth, and that on our deathbed we're visited by preternatural calm and perfect clarity.

Well, maybe. But it probably also scares us shitless and encourages us to say any fool thing that enters our fevered brains. Let's be honest, if deathbed utterances were a reliable handbook for life, then the famous author's commencement speech would be titled "More Morphine, Please." And, for once, I'd actually believe he wrote it.