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Ever since my left lung collapsed, I have air-o-phobia, or scuba phobia? I mean, it re-inflated, but you spend six months bed bound with five broken ribs and you tell me you don’t fight for every breath. I see old people walking with their wheeled oxygen tanks and wish I had me one of those. Phobias – when do fears become phobias? A doctor’s note from your therapist? “Claustro” sounds like closet. I dunno, the cubicles I worked in inside those huge office building with windows that cannot open relying on some whirling hidden machinery to deliver air to all fifty stories? Did that affect our brains? What about natural light? Ah yes, the corner office acquired through resolutely kicking people down on the lower rungs. Legionnaire’s disease is delivered through the vents in aging hotels. Maybe the claustrophobics were canaries in the coal mine. Maybe we shouldn’t congregate like that anymore. Those tenement buildings with impossibly narrow stairways that our immigrant forebears tolerated, six to a room, standing in food lines, waiting for a truck to pick up day laborers, jail cells, oh my Gaia, jail cells. Debtor’s prisons. I can’t imagine the horror of claustrophobic inmate. Compassion in short supply, even though many don’t deserve to be there. I must keep my heart open, and my air supply constant. We’ll get through this.