About the Author

Watson woke up in a panick, as usual. "Shit! What time is it?!" He wasn't asking his girlfriend who was sleeping next to him, he was thinking out loud as he woke. She answered him anyway, "Ten Forty." After he flung himself out of bed, he could feel his broken fibula shifting around and making movements that seemed like they should have accompanying sounds. Still, he hobbled around looking for clothes. It was too close to 11:15, and his daily appointment required that he make it by 11:15 at the absolute -latest-. The doctor had prescribed him 30 nicotine patches, 21 mg each, so that he would stop smoking. She explained that patients with tourette's, she read, had been observed in research studies to try to manage their tics with nicotine. So she tried to help him quit smoking and standardize the nicotine with patches.

A clinical application for nicotine gave him a great respect and interest for this doctor. Synchronicity had been making it's comical appearances, like mythical creatures hiding behind light poles, behind doors, outside windows, on roofs sticking their heads around, up and over and their tongues out to mock him. Synchronicity reminded him that living was as much comedy as tragedy. It was a perfect relief to the stress that life creates and how unequipped Watson was in dealing with it.

The student doctor had asked him if he were interested in quitting and Watson was commencing to equivocate when the doctor came in and told him about Tourette's and nicotine and wrote the patch script. It often felt like the gods positioned cosmic punchlines in media, television and sometimes even books or emails, which could be shared for verification between he and his girl. Watson was superstitious, but synchronicity was a "faith-based" sense like deja vu, presque vu, or jamais vu.

So he made his appointment, made his way back home, smoked a cigarette that had broken and he repaired for his last one, and put a patch on his ass. Watson chose to put transdermal patches on his ass, because he believed that when you sat down, it gave you an extra boost of the pharmaceutical nicotine delivered. This was probably not scientific, and he really started this because when the generic and store brands of patch came onto the market, their adhesive properties were somehow inferior to the original ones, and when you sat on them, the adhesion was reinforced if you can follow the thinking. Try it out if you can't.

Two hours passed as he and his lover watched the third season of the wire. The show always moved him with it's characters and their addressing ethical, personal, strategic and related challenges of what were to Watson the most important conflicts he could imagine. The challenge of feeling whole and succeeding in making your heart sit well in your chest, and being able to see eye to eye with yourself in the mirror.