Lulu knew she was an endorphin addict. She could remember the delicious sensation of collapsing on her bed after an all-day walk with her high-school best friend. Twelve hours of sauntering and striding, snacking on fresh rolls and fruit from the grocery stores they passed, discussing their schoolmates, explaining the cosmos, and they would return to her house with legs heavy as sandbags. They fell backwards onto her twin bed and it seemed that their bodies would continue to sink into the mattress, endlessly heavy at rest. Full-on gravity.

She recollected her three post-partum hours. With each birth she’d had that amazing time right afterwards, when her traumatized body anesthetized itself, and cold apple juice tasted better than divine nectar. Apple juice. Sweet, piss-colored child’s-drink, and it was finer than the best champagne. That was endorphins.

But shit: nine months of pregnancy (not to mention a lifetime of rearing/loving) is a big price to pay for an hour of incredible high. Twelve hours of walking is hard to arrange. Lulu once met a man who was amazingly well-preserved for his age. He was seventy-five when she knew Jim and he comported himself like a forty year old. She learned his secret, because he became the lover of a good friend of hers. Jim rose each morning at 5:30, and did two full hours of stretching before anything else. Those two hours set him up for the next fourteen: he could move like a man half his age. That was two hours a day, to achieve flexibility. It probably would take six hours a day for happiness.

She didn’t have six spare hours. She could steal a bit more from sleep, but two hours a day for exercise-type activities was her limit. She was almost-happy, almost-crazy, and motivated to get more.

Lulu didn’t want to win the lottery. She never dreamt of inheriting wealth. The truth is, when she imagined abundance she got nervous. It didn’t take much before she was envisioning herself in a pressure-cooker of philanthropy – if she had wealth she’d have to give some of it away. So a lot of money would mean a lot of giving. She’d hate to spend her life at that. Nah: she liked to earn money; she wanted to get high and laugh.

She didn’t want to live forever. Oh she appreciated existence (what were the odds, after all?) and she’d managed to mostly enjoy her life so far, but it was easy for her to imagine growing weary of it. She’d had moments of that already. And with every friend who succumbed to cancer, Lulu better understood the terrible chaos of immortality: that awful disorganized fecundity, the jungle-rot mutation that never dies… She did not want to live forever, but she wanted to select words to tell stories that would live longer than she.

And she certainly wasn’t looking for love&marriage. Not any more. She lusted for connection (of course), but she had come to see capital-L love with its adjunct capital-M marriage as a barrier to that connection. The marriage team was bound to be an advantage in a struggle for survival but in Lulu’s eyes, around Lulu’s life and among her acquaintances, the institution seemed to hold each member back. The arrangement always required some aspect of arrested development or deceit on the part of the participants, or else it evolved without control and into risk.

It seemed increasingly obvious to her that love&marriage was not making the world go ‘round. Laughter was. Thousands of saints and philosophers have tried to explain God in terms of love, and have foundered in the shoals of misfortune and injustice. The good die young. Nice guys finish last. You need the patience of Job (to even read the story of Job!). Those things made no sense, without carrying the majesty of mystery. But if you view God as a standup comic, smiting nomads with hemorrhoids and consumers with pollution, playing death as sarcasm and tragedy as trick endings, if you see yourself as created in God’s image in that you can see yourself, and laugh, then the cosmos begins to make sense.

Lulu’s fifty-second birthday was approaching when she first organized these ideas. She celebrated by taking on a bit of anorexia nervosa. Within a month she was ingesting less than eight hundred calories a day. Nothing too drastic, but enough to promote a little endorphin release. Which, when added to the gain from two hours of exercise, and mixed in with regular pot and occasional Vicodin and sometimes even sex, made for a gratifying maturity. She might just write a book.