AS GOOD AS IT GETS.

March 2, 2007

I wrote this one after a call that caught me off guard—not with blood or chaos, but with gentleness, and tragedy, and the kind of fragile dignity you don’t often find anymore. He was brilliant. Isolated. A man tucked away in a cluttered apartment 20 floors up, wrapped in rituals and swallowed by silence. But behind the tics and worn clothes was a mind that still burned with precision—an ocean of knowledge in a man afraid to ask for help because he didn’t want to be seen as stupid. That line hit me hard. Because I’ve felt that too—the need to be understood, the fear of being dismissed. He wasn’t a frequent flyer or a psych call. He was a scholar. A builder. A man holding his world together with structure, habit, and a whisper of hope. I wrote this to remember him. And to remind myself that sometimes the most profound lives don’t come screaming into the ER—they walk in quietly, with books in their pockets and a story no one’s asked to hear in years.

That’s as good as it gets.