And it's only just now that it's amazing- not a few hours ago when I got the idea to shoot myself in the head, not while I was parking the car, walking into the gun shop, perusing the items in the shelf, choosing a slick by deadly looking semi-automatic nine millimeter (and some of them do look quite undeadly, like little toys. Toys for grown-up boys, I suppose, or men who heard that guns are compensation for a penis deficiency and decided that only a gun fit for a clown dick would do). Not when I hefted it, heavier than it looks, in my hand, nor when I asked for a box of clips, paid for it with my visa platinum card that draws on my and my husband's private account, not when I drove home, made some dinner, then on a whim which had been building up inside me for more than a year picked up the gun and pulled the trigger.

Not even, and this is really remarkable, not even as the hammer struck the blasting cap, igniting the gun powder, forcing the bullet down the rifled barrel, making it spin to ensure a straight trajectory, even though I had it placed firmly against my temple, so it's not as if pin-point accuracy from a hundred yards was even necessary.

The bullet has left my other temple now, incidentally, so I don't have very much time left. This idea came to me after the bullet burst through the skin in my head, exploding the bone, and the fragments were about two inches from where they had been, the brain matter oxidizing from the heat of the blast as the bullet bore through, and right then I realized that it was actually the force of the blast around the bullet, not the actual metal of the bullet itself, that was ripping through my skull at roughly the speed of sound. And the idea came to me in a flash, an instantaneous flash, I mean, that atom in France vibrating is so small that it can't be partially measured, that is, the distance it travels through one oscillation is unmeasurable, but since it is moving at something which approaches the speed of light or would if it was a measurable distance and light was slow enough to measure to those same fifteen decimal places, it can't be judged, so the number of oscillations is all that's important, I suppose, only detectable because the position of the nucleus seems to rotate, but anyway, the point is, when the bullet hit my hippocampus, where all the primal fear and sexual energy is allegedly controlled, a part of our brains that we inherited from the dinosaurs, that's when I figured this thing out that I need to tell you.

This is really amazing. The bullet is about two inches away from my head, a spray of blood and brain and blood behind it, and I'm so alive right now before I die, I can actually see separate photons from the light bulb course into my eyes; photons are bouncing off the various surfaces, I can even see how one that leapt out of the filament of the bulb ricocheted off the counter, the wall, my gun, the table and my head. I can see billions no trillions of others, I can actually count them at this moment, which photons missed atoms all together and went through the floor or the wall or the ceiling and separately are hurtling off into space, only to be detected by either some alien device capable of detecting the position and speed of a single subatomic particle, which Einstein told us is impossible, or dare I say another housewife somewhere out there who when faced with the idea to shoot herself in the head with a gun in the middle of scampi and a glass of chilled chablis couldn't think of a reason not to, given that the universe is filled with a countable number of quarks screaming in and out of existence so incessantly that the miracle of life is not a miracle at all but merely a probability exercise for a college sophomore.

The idea- and I really must hurry, as sympathetic neurons have failed to fire in my cerebral cortex, signaling a misstep in the process which sends blood from my heart to my head, meaning I will die very very soon, soon being relative of course, if we could after all track that atom, zoom in and invent a new micrometaproton which traveled at a speed sufficiently higher than light and weighing a fraction of reality using the square root of negative one so that Einstein's theory that things shrink or is it grow as they speed up has no effect, we would see that the atom has moved but one millionth the width of an electron- the idea is simply that words invent everything, that when the bible said everything started with the word of God that this was not a metaphor but the literal truth.

Consider Finnegan's Wake, from which we get the word quark itself. Oxygen, the main ingredient in rust, fire, and respiration, will no longer be able to combine with the cells in my brain now, meaning death, all death is ultimately due to lack of oxygen to brain cells, I am for all intents and purposes dead now, my arm has already succumbed to gravity as my muscles are no longer receiving electrical impulses from my brain telling it to hold itself up, my knees and the muscles in my thighs are as dead as a concrete statue poorly made and whipped to pieces by the ravages of time, and I am falling, we need to only wait for the acceleration of gravity to bring me to the position where they will find me, to send the gun bouncing across the floor and to make it fire one more time, I can see that this will happen, I can actually calculate it because although all reality is a complex series of random quarks flashing in and out of the patterns of their existence towards a common continuity, I can see that the way in which the molecules which make up this my kitchen will mean that I fall this way, the gun falls that way, the shock will be a certain loudness and the trigger will vibrate from the crash just such a way and send another bullet through the cabinets and lodge firmly behind the pipes beneath the sink.

Consider quarks, which never existed at all until James Joyce invented them in his book which he wrote because he was insane, he had to be, no sane man would have enough audacity to request such writing be published, but he knew that words created reality, and he knew that without a book as seemingly nonsensical as Finnegan's Wake the world would never be able to explain the chaotic random nature of nothingness out of which substance is made; at the very moment when things are most confused is when an understanding emerges, just as God created existence out of the chaos of nonsense. This goes beyond paradox, and at the very second James Joyce took a sip from the bottle, adjusted his incredibly thick glasses, and wrote the word quark, from which science would decide was the basis of everything, ever, so much so that it defies time, even, at that moment the space aliens from outer outer outer space in place so far away that even if they were to travel at the speed of all time they wouldn't make it back here before we all go supernova, they began to move towards this ripple of reality created by James that day.

Which is why if I could I would write this all down right now because having taken the path as equally probable as not shooting myself I see that I have something to actually say. But, then there's the device of future prediction which predicts that it will predict the future, making you wonder if it would have predicted the future if it hadn't predicted that it would, so too do I wonder if by not killing myself would I have made this profound discovery. Certainly I wouldn't have been able to say that the bright light is not made out of protons at all, and although I know everything at this exact moment, I must admit I don't know what that light is made of.