“Sitting in a cluttered hovel, staring at a screen, writing stuff like this, waiting for nothing, ” he wrote, trying to define it succinctly.

“That is not the definition of insanity,” said his imaginary friend, breathing out loudly through large nostrils.

“Takes one to know one,” he wrote on the screen, where his hulking imaginary friend sulked.

“Enough with the imaginary friends,” said a real friend, but it caught him unawares.

“But, Howie, you’re dead,” he said.

“Sure,” Howie said, the most cheerful dead man you’d ever want to see, “but then again, what do we really know about death?  I was sitting at a traffic light in Berkeley, one minute alive as you and me… well, alive as you, anyway, and the next minute.”  He snapped his fingers.

“You recall that ragged guy you passed this afternoon lying in the grass?  Up by the Allen Pavilion?  You paused, watched to see if he was breathing.  At first he didn’t seem to be.  What did the woman getting out of the car nearby do?  She asked you if he was breathing.  You said he was.  The two of you approached him.  She touched a hand to his filthy naked shoulder and shook him when he didn’t answer.  You asked him if he needed help after he grunted.”

“Is this a Zen koan?” he asked his dead friend.

“No, it’s a bell of mindfulness.  When the woman walked back to the car, satisfied that the dead looking guy was alive and didn’t want help, another woman came up to you.  A fat woman with a smart phone in her hand and a kind expression on her round face.  She was also concerned about the dirty man in the wife-beater lying face down on the grass.  You spoke for a moment and she walked back uptown to let the hospital’s security guard know a man might be expiring a block from the Emergency Room.”

“A bell of mindfulness,” he mused.

“Yes,” Howie said. “there’s nothing to be gained by defining insanity.  Most people would qualify, by one definition or another.  You have a heart, and a conscience, and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and you don’t know how to proceed, or how to put your head down against the wind, and you tend to lose faith.   That doesn’t add up to insane, in my book.”

“A bell of mindfulness,” he mused, smiled at his dead friend, put on a white shirt, a pair of shorts, his helmet, shouldered the Chinese-made Schwinn and headed down the stairs to the avenue to do his laps up and back in the faintly cooled summer night.  The bell of mindfulness sounded faintly as he went.