Thursday, Apr. 03, 2003 | 2:26 PM

Nathaniel, Sr.: Do you believe that your consciousness affects the behavior of subatomic particles?

Nate: Am I alive or am I dead?

Nathaniel, Sr.: (ignoring him) Do you believe that particles move backwards and forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once?

Nate: (ignoring him) And if I am dead, is this heaven or hell?

Nathaniel, Sr.: (ignoring him) Do you believe that the universe is constantly splitting into billions of parallel universes?

Nate: (yelling) WHAT THE FUCK DO I CARE?!?

Nathaniel, Sr: You only get one choice, so you may want to think about this.

Nate: (desperate) Just tell me. Am I dead? Yes. Or No.

Nathaniel, Sr.: Yes.

NATE sighs, defeated.

Nathaniel, Sr.: And no.

NATE looks up, even more perplexed and frustrated.

Nathaniel, Sr.: Some places you�re dead, some places you�re alive. Some places you never even existed. Possibly, theoretically. Or who knows, this could just be the anesthesia talking.

-- from Season 3 Episode 1 of Six Feet Under (the greatest television show of all time)

I don�t know about you, but my life often feels inevitable. I look back on moments from the past and see all the dramatic irony, the foreshadowing, the sense that this is a story I am taking part in. A story that like a missile, has a specific course and destination, and that I am under the illusion, sitting atop this missile (like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove, hootin and a hoillerin�) that I have some control over where this thing is taking me.

And then yet again I know that I am the person writing this story. Or the higher part of me that stands over myself� the me that holds the puppet strings of wooden puppet-me dnacing mindlessly below, is directing the action.

There seems to me too much synchronicity in life that it should all be coincidence. And yet I don�t think there�s some God with a thunderbolt making grand decisions, moving us around like pieces on a chess board.

But it isall a chess board isn�t it? You move and someone else moves and you can�t take that move back and you�re fucked. Or you move and you could so easily take that other person�s pawn which would maneuver you into declaring

Check mate Mutherfucker!

But you don�t because you�re too stupid to have seen it.

Or maybe you win by accident. Or maybe you lose on purpose.

We�re all just playing chess against the fates. The game could have so many different outcomes.

Sometimes I wonder if there were certain days, certain choices I made�small ones seemingly, which would have leads me to entirely different outcomes. That maybe everything would have turned out differently.

I wonder often what would have happened if I didn�t go to Emerson College. Or if my father�s doctor had made him take a stress test. Or if my mother hadn�t gone out on a blind date with the man who became (end then un-became) my stepfather.

I wonder what would have happened if I had kept running instead of letting someone grab my arm and stop me. I wonder what would have happened if I had gone to that clinic and while on the table said,

No, I can�t do this..

I wonder what would have happened if I had never worked at the Stupid Company. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn�t moved by myself this time and instead gotten roommates.

I wonder what would have happened if I�d gone on the National Tour of Annie when I was five. Would I have stayed in theater for the rest of my life? Or turned out to be some junky ex child star?

And I don�t wonder these things with regret (well OK�except when I�m drunk�) I wonder them with a detached curiosity�like someone who wants to read all the books that have ever been written but there just isn�t enough time.

And there aren�t enough moments to live all the lives you could have lived. There�s only this one�this moment, right now, in which you have to make a million choices and feel a million things.

I guess that�s why I love acting so much. You can be all the people you�d ever want to be, and you never lose out on being anyone else.