I lay in bed in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon, staring up at the ceiling and watching the sunlight fade from the room. I couldn’t nap, couldn’t rest. A creature had taken up residence in my throat and chest. I imagined it to be black and very hairy, with large leathery wings. It wasn’t quite a bird and wasn’t quite a mammal, just this hairy winged thing, like a shaggy, greasy bat.

It moved around, pacing between my uvula and heart, shuffling and trying to stretch its wings. I imagined what it would feel like when the shaggy bat burst past my lips and lifted off, cutting ragged figure-8s around the paper lamps hanging from my ceiling.

Smithfield Ham is a meat like no other. A close cousin to Italian prosciutto, Smithfield ham is the meat of peanut-fed hogs, salt-cured and hickory smoked for a minimum of six months in the corporate limits of Smithfield, Virginia — home to my grandparents, aunt and uncle. Smithfield ham is drier and more thickly cut than supple, subtle prosciutto. Compared to Smithfield ham, prosciutto is the damp rag used to wipe a hog farmer’s work boots.

In a purely physical sense, Smithfield ham is terrible for you. The only way it could harm your heart more from a medical perspective would be if a surgeon were to slice your chest open and manually pack your arteries with wads of the stuff. From an emotional perspective, it is Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, love and forgiveness and bedtime stories all in one salty, fat-filled bite. Draped over a handmade biscuit with butter, it is also Prozac, Lithium and THC.

The bat flapped tireless, frustrated laps up and down my throat all last night, all this morning, in the cab to La Guardia, on the plane and all the way through the airport. It wouldn’t come out, and it was getting hairier by the hour, so hairy it got heavy when it settled on my chest to tongue its wet wings clean.

I keep waiting for the real grief to happen, but I just feel numb. I feel like I’m made out of balsa wood or something — soft and flexible, but easily shattered. All I want to do is read. I am an Easy Reader of epic proportions on a normal day, but now I am positively EATING words. I finished “Bonfire of the Vanities” on the plane and started right in on Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance.” I was able to take a break from reading and joke around with my dad and sister while we shopped for funeral suits this afternoon, but after reading Pop-Pop’s obituary in the local paper, I couldn’t stop. It was all I could do not to wad the newspaper up and stuff it in my mouth — knocked out the front page, local section, comics and started in on the classifieds by the time we pulled up to my aunt and uncle’s house.

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My friend Steve forwarded me an incredible found letter the other day. Here’s a clip, click here or on the photo for a link to the entire thing:

This letter’s writer has a life so far removed from my own that I can’t believe we both speak English. I am not sure that I ever wrote love letters like this to girls when I was this young Crip’s age, and I’m sure that if I had, I wouldn’t have threatened an other “niggas.”

Underneath the smitten Crip’s bravado and posturing, and not far underneath it, either, he is lonely, desperate, wanting someone who is in all likelihood out of his grasp. His looks won’t catch his girl’s eye, so he’s turned to the creative arts, the romantic refuge for everyone whose physical charms are exceeded by their creativity.

However, if that’s the case here, my man must have a JACKED up face — his prose clinks like bullet casings on wet concrete. With nerve and bravery like this, though, he’s sure to have found someone to share his corner of the Crip kingdom with by now, as long as he hasn’t been shot yet.

It saddens me to think that love letters are a dying art form — that e-mail sent the penned missive the way of the dodo bird and now e-mail’s heading out, too. Soon lovelorn Crips and geeky kids will have to confess their passion in strage gluts of emoticons and beeping sounds, leaving me and Cyrano and this ugly little Crip to sit around in the museum case of the mind, slowly collecting dust.