I Wear Ties, Part II

You might recall part one of I Wear Ties. Or not. I don't care.

It was a poem. This will not be a poem, because it's too hot to write one. Part One was written on November 25, 2009 when, apparently, it wasn't too hot to write one.

Whether you remember Part One or not, this is Part Two.

Thanks.

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So, I wear ties.

Most people who wear ties, I wager, wear them to work. Forever an anomaly, I wear ties when I am not working.

"I must be crazy," a library patron said to my mother while returning some books, "but I thought I saw your son last weekend mowing his grass wearing a shirt, tie, and a hat."

"No," my mother smiled, "you're not crazy. That was him."

I wear ties when I'm not working because I love ties. Always have. Regrettably, I can't wear ties when I am working. As many of you know, I work at a psychiatric hospital and some patients would just relish the opportunity to choke the balls off me were I stupid enough to wear a tie at work. Some of them are quite grabby, and you don't want to give them anything to grab-- especially if it's something that's around your neck and has the potential to cut off oxygen supply to your brain.

When you wear ties out in the community in the year 2011, people think you know things. I wish I had kept empirical data, but I only have anecdotal evidence that drivers who are lost routinely pick me to ask for directions more frequently when I am neck-bedecked than when I am not. There's something about a tie that inspires confidence or gives off the air of authority. When Mrs. Apron and I were walking around downtown Lexington, Virginia on our vacation last month, two lunatics in a thirty-year-old Winnebago stopped and asked me for directions to the nearest hotel. And I, of course, was wearing a tie.

When I was seventeen, I was at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia waiting for a train. For some reason-- I can't really recall why-- I was dressed in a dark blue, three-piece suit. I was standing around with my hands behind my back, just gazing vacantly off into space, and some random person came up to me and started asking me questions about train schedules.

"Um, I'm sorry-- I don't work for AMTRAK," I said apologetically. But why was I apologizing? I wasn't the person who assumed that the kid in the suit was actually somebody who knew something. Maybe the guy just thought I must have had Aspergers and had memorized all the train schedules for fun.

Wearing a shirt and tie to CVS will result in people asking you if Ban deodorant is on sale or where the Depends are kept.

Just yesterday, my wife and I were at Target for grapes and paper towels and other unbelievably exciting things. As soon as we entered the store, Mrs. Apron said, "I'm going to go pee-- will you wait for me by the carts?"

Sure. Of course I will. And so I stood there, in my olive green trousers, light blue short-sleeve dress shirt and plaid tie, close to the exit door. Too close, apparently. A fifty-year-old guy in a wife-beater and his eighty-something-year-old mama, huffing and puffing the way that people with COPD do, were shuffling towards the exit. The son was excitedly holding his receipt, perseverating, "I gotta find out if I'm an instant winner! I hope I'm an instant winner!" As he propelled himself towards the exit doors, his mother yelled, "BILL! BILL! WAIT! YOU'VE GOT TO SHOW HIM YOUR RECEIPT BEFORE YOU LEAVE!"

I looked up, because I knew she was referring to me. The man marched up to me and shoved his receipt in my face.

"That's okay," I said, smiling wanly, "you don't have to show me anything."

Real Time

Whoa.

This is trippy.

As I write these words, it's 6:56am, on Tuesday, May 10th.

This is how I used to roll-- back in the day. I'd wake up at the bum-slit of dawn, walk the dogs, make coffee, and come back up to the office to write, and then I'd post live, somewhere between 7:15 and 7:45 in the morning. The day's post was pretty much always up before eight. Of course, this post won't go live until its scheduled time of 7:18am, EST on May 11th, because I've already got a post pre-loaded for Tuesday.

Because I'm just. that. cray. in the mem. brane.

Writing in the morning again feels weird. Off. Nostalgic. There are birds outside my window making ridiculous noises. They sound even funnier than Asian chicks make when they're getting pounded, and I think we all know how funny that is. Birds are truly idiotic if you watch the right ones and you watch them closely enough. Small birds especially. They all look like they have epilepsy-- not that epilepsy is funny, so please save your righteously indignant emails about that-- but they way they dart around and jerk their heads-- it's like they're break-dancing to strobe lights.

Fucking birds. I hate epilepsy.

Anyway, part of the reason I'm writing in the morning on Tuesday is because it's an assignment from my therapist. It is designed to keep my ass in this chair and not in my car, speeding to my 8:30am appointment with him, which I have every Tuesday morning. The first time I ever saw him, I arrived at 7:47am. That seemed absurd, even to me, but I rationalized those negative thoughts away by saying to myself, "Well, you're a new patient, of course you're going to have paperwork to fill out." And, what do you know, I did have paperwork to fill out. However, I was unable to start said paperwork for twenty minutes, because, when I arrived at 7:47am, the doors to his office were not even unlocked.

I've been trying to force myself to leave the house later each week, so that I arrive at his office at a socially acceptable "early" time. The latest I am allowing myself to leave the house so far is 7:40, which is almost epileptically funny if you consider the time I arrived at his office five weeks ago for our first appointment. According to Google Directions, which is never wrong-- just like Wikipedia-- it takes between 22 and 24 minutes to get to my therapist's office, and the distance is 9.8 miles. Knowing that, any reasonable person who lives in my house would most likely leave that house for an 8:30am therapy appointment at 8:00am.

I'm not sure I can do that. See, it's 7:08am right now and I'm already getting schpilkus.

(Schpilkus, n, Yid: Ants-in-da-pants.)

They say that "the unknown" is the biggest inducer of fear in most people. I don't know who "they" are but they must never be wrong-- like Google Directions and Wikipedia and Dr. Oz-- and, frankly, I'm willing to agree with "them". I fear the unknown probably more than I fear carotid artery disease or an abdominal aortic aneurysm or skeevy people in elevators or someone hitting my car where the gas tank is located. Of course, I fear all of that, too, but the unknown is far more seductive because it comprises any number of awful, terrible things, including CAD and a Triple-A and all that other shit I mentioned, as well as... everything else.

Where I'm going with this is, I'm obsessively early because of that... unknownness. The traffic jam occurring up the way. The car accident. The detour. The bottleneck. The what-ifs. My life is comprised of approximately 753,000 what-ifs, and I have them for every single circumstance or situation in which I engage in daily life. Why do I write my blogs a day or sometimes two or sometimes three in advance? Well, what if the internet connection goes down tomorrow and I'm unable to post.

Well, what the fuck if?

Who gives a shit? Maybe you. Definitely me, that much I think we know for sure. But it's more about the settling of the beast within me that craves consistency and sameness and order and security. Do you know that those words are comforting, even to tap out on the keyboard and see appearing on the screen?

Last week, I was assigned by my therapist (goddamned C.B.T.) to wait just ten more minutes before hopping in the car and sit and force myself to write about what it feels like to write while making myself not leave the house for my appointment.

"See," I said to him in his office last week, after arriving there at 8:06am, which is better, "everything got all fucked up this morning because I had coffee at Starbucks with my father, so I wasn't at home and I wasn't at a computer, and I wasn't going to write on my smartphone."

"Did you consider, after your father left to go to work, just hanging around at Starbucks by yourself for another ten or fifteen minutes?"

I stared at my shoes. I had considered that, but I didn't do it.

"Yeah," I replied, "but we'd been sitting outside and it was kind of chilly and, besides, who the hell wants to sit at Starbucks all alone anyway?"

Hm, I would have said to me, had I been the therapist, only about half the fucking civilized world. But, you're right-- who the hell would want to sit at Starbucks, listen to inoffensive, faux-indie muzzak, enjoying a delectable, warm beverage while looking at hot, mousy-haired medical students studying for their Step II exams on their iMacs?

It's 7:20am, on May 10th. I'm going to schedule this post. Shave. Leave the house. Get a pastry from someplace.

And go.

30 Minutes at Home

What can one do when one has 30 minutes at home? After eight hours of negotioting one's way through a myriad milieu of psych patients, one laughing uproariously as he swings a shit-filled "Attends" diaper over their head like a cowboy might swing a lasso, one crying for no apparent reason, another attempting to pick a fight with two broken arms and a brain full of cobwebs, an hour-long, sunglare-filled commute home (plus a pitstop at Chipotle to bring home bulging burrito dinner for self and goodlady wife), a half-hour in between work and alleged play-- rehearsal for gay operetta that nobody will come to see. A rehearsal that will begin with another car door slam at 5:45pm and one more at 10:45pm (if we don't fuck up that badly).

What does one do?

One blogs.

Hi. I love you.

Blargh.

Oh, and Happy Veteran's Day. Um... there's lots more I'm forgetting. But, today, there's just no time.

AAAAAAAAAAH!

Or, as Cathy would say, "AAAAAAAAAACK!"

My swimsuit doesn't fit.