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.

Oh, Technology: Stop Driving a Wedge Into My Ass Already, Will You?

A couple of years ago, my wife and I and another couple went on a joint vacation to Lancaster County during July 4th weekend. We toured some fucking place-- I don't remember what the hell it was-- and this bitch in a bonnet tour guide tried to lay some smack down on us about how the Amish way of life-- eschewing electronica and whatnot-- is the way to go because, clearly, "technology is driving a wedge between us."

Really, we all know it's about them not paying taxes. But I won't tell anybody if you won't. It can be our little secret.

It's hard to convince a habitual blogger with a 3G cellphone that technology is driving him apart from other people. I mean, really-- I don't need technology to isolate myself; I'm quite adept at doing that on my own. And I was socially awkward before Aspergers became cool, too.

Technology brought me and my wife together on Tuesday night to watch Watson fucking annihilate Ken Jennings and that bearded D who looks like a yacht playboy from the '70s. I have no doubt that the IBM technology that was on display from the 14th-16th of February on Jeopardy! brought a shitload more people "together" than Jeopardy! normally does. Outside of assisted living facilities and minimum security white collar prisons, that is.

While the spectacle was just a big advertising handjob for IBM, I've got to say, I was pretty fucking impressed. And it takes a lot to impress me-- believe me, people have tried and, outside from perfectly performed patter songs or athletic amateur porn flexibility, attempts to impress me generally don't measure up. "Amadeus" at the Walnut-- America's oldest theatre-- left me overcome with the blah's. And we left at intermission, courtesy of my wife's migraine.

(I was all set to ask her if we could go before I knew she was really going through it.)

You know how kids are always like, "Daddy! Look at me! I'm doing a headstand" or some shit? My kid's going to have to be reading the evening news behind a desk in his bedroom with make-up on his eyebrows for me to take notice.

Ironically, though, while being brought together in front of a piece of technology (our flatscreen TV) to behold a piece of technology (Watson) kick the ass of a skeevy guy and a Mormon, the piece of technology that I marveled at the most on Tuesday night had nothing to do with IBM or Mormonism. It had to do with Jefferson University Hospital.

In our viewing area, as those of you who are blessed to live near my zipcode can attest, there was a slick, fancy-pants commercial put together by the super-skilled and probably still virginal A.V. folks at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

(NB: I think it's funny that hospitals have commercials, but that's a post for another day.)

Anyway, this piece focused on the Endoscopy Department and relatively decent-looking physicians whose first language is English were discussing the merits of newly-developed (say it with me now, Amisherkinderlings) TECHNOLOGY that the hospital's researchers have recently developed.

Get this: it's a fucking camera inside a pill. You swallow it, and they follow its path through your intestines and they can diagnose what's wrong with your smacked-up G.I. system.

And then, you poop it out!

Amazing, right?

My wife, who has GERD, (HIPAA VIOLATION!!!!) turned to me after the commercial's conclusion, slackjawed and said,

"Holy shit! That is so fucking cool!"

"I KNOW!" I exclaimed. And then I got hit with a stroke of genius. "What if they could mount a mini camera on a penis--"

"Oh, Jesus," she said. That's right. Here it comes-- too late to stop.

"Yeah! And you get a guy to fuck a chick who's having, like, vag problems! And the doctors are sitting there in the control room watching it zoom in, zoom out. Zoom in. Zoom out! Get it?"

"Oh," she said, "I get it."

"And then you get a gay guy to put the camera on his dick when some other gay guy has prostate cancer, or rectal cancer, and then you fuck him with the Dick Cam 2000. It's GENIUS."

Technology driving us apart-- please. What a crock of shit. I guess no Amish chicks'll be getting their sick pussies fucked by the Dick Cam anytime soon.

Such a Rake

On Tuesday, my day off, I was determined to be both productive and leisurely. On Monday evening, after returning from a Target Run with the Mrs., I turned to her and said,

"I'm going to take care of all these fucking leaves tomorrow, it's getting ridiculous. I'll probably need a bulldozer. The neighbors are getting restless, I think."

"Meh," my wife said, failing to notice that every lawn on our street is distinctly devoid of fallen autumn leaves, and that our section of the street was littered with rather substantive leafy mountains.

My lovely wife, I suspect, has a similar lack of social awareness that her lovely parents possess. Oftentimes, they are mystified as to why they don't fit in with their affluent neighbors in Providence, R. I. My mother-in-law and father-in-law look great, on paper. They're Jewish, and she's an attorney and he's a psychiatrist, probably just like lots of power-couples in their neighborhood. Of course, there are cracks in the plaster. She's an attorney who wears pink jumpers emblazoned with cartoon pigs, frilly socks, and a handbag shaped like a watering can. He's a psychiatrist, who, even when attired in a sport coat, collared shirt, dress pants and a tie, looks like he just rolled out of bed on a good day, or a dumpster on a not so good day. Their lawn is unkempt, there are often cast-off cars in their driveway, their mentally disorganized dogs haphazardly pull them down the neighborhood streets and bark at unseemly hours of the day and night, sometimes resulting in law enforcement contact.

While my wife and her family are afflicted with the curse of unawareness, I am struck by hyper-awareness. Or maybe it's paranoia. I'm not really sure, but, since I'm as yet undiagnosed, let's stick with the colloquial. I constantly feel the searing stares of others upon me when I do something, or, worse, don't do something. When our lawn is an unfortunate state, I know I am silently being judged by those around us-- older, wiser, more competent, more experienced, more... with it. As I've said before, lawn care doesn't interest me in the slightest, as I suspect it doesn't interest many other people my age who happen to have the good fortune to have a house to maintain. But I know that I'm supposed to give a shit about mowing and raking and trimming, so I do it. As Pooh-Bah says in The Mikado, "it revolts me, but I do it."

And, Tuesday morning, I did it. With a snow shovel.

Now, as I was "raking" my autumn leaves with a tool definitely manufactured for a different purpose and a different season, neighbors passed me by, jogging, walking their children to the elementary school that I attended as a boy, getting into their cars to start their daily commutes, and I couldn't help but think to myself, "Was what they were thinking and saying about me before they saw me cleaning up the street with a snow shovel worse or better than what they're thinking and saying about me now, watching me shovel gargantuan piles of red, brown, orange, yellow, and purple leaves with a snow shovel?"

And I suppose what it all comes down to (my friend) is that I'll never know, just as those around me will never know the vitriolic, frustrated, judgmental sentiments I have about lots of them (especially that bald jerkoff with the black Passat wagon) and what does it all really matter anyway? A lot of the time, I wish that I could operate more like my wife and her family, wandering around unaware of the vast, great distance that separates us from The Joneses.

Or maybe there's a happy medium somewhere in there. But, for a guy who cleans up leaves with a snow shovel, I sort of doubt it.

Muckety-Muck

Here are some random thoughts/questions/observations to get you through your daily/nightly muckety-muck.

* What is it about being a Certified Public Accountant that somehow makes you qualified to observe a state lottery drawing on television? Do CPAs get time-tested on identifying ping-pong balls with black numbers on them?

* Why is it that white, dour, ridiculous-looking politicians in their mid-fifties can't seem to keep their dicks in their pants? I mean, seriously-- what the fuck? There's Spitzer, the South Carolina governor-- that faggot in the airport bathroom... Do black politicians boink people who aren't their wives? Doesn't seem like it. Do women politicians get mustache rides from mystery men in anonymous hotel rooms? Hard to imagine, isn't it? Well, maybe "unpleasant" is a better word.

* Why are people all-of-a-sudden totally obsessive about holding the door open for other patrons at the WaWa, but don't seem to give a shit about it at any other commercial establishment? Seriously-- this is a bizarre kind of chivalry I haven't observed anywhere else-- it's like WaWa is the Court of King Arthur. I have no idea what that's about-- but it happens to me, too. Then again, I hold the door open for people everywhere and, invariably, I get stuck there while Indian families consisting of a dozen or more members leisurely troll on through while my wife stands, grinning at me.

* Why does it always rain when I decide to leave the car windows open? On a related topic: God, why do you love kicking me in the schnutz?

* What the fuck happened to WHYY Channel 12? It was a victim of the D-TV Revolution. Che Guevera of the airwaves killed it. It is dead. No more "Antiques Roadshow" on Monday nights. We just don't get it anymore. I've tried rescanning the motherfucking TV six times now. It's gone. We get Channel 23, which is New Jersey PBS, and so we get to watch "Roadshow" on Tuesday nights but, seriously, one PBS station (from another alien state, no less) is not adequate PBSage for this household. The decrease in PBS stations can only be a bad thing for the already retarded American populous.

* I'm seriously over Paris Hilton. Even naked Paris Hilton gets on my fucking nerves.

* Apparently, people commonly stand in the aisles of Yemeni planes for the entire duration of their flights. Can you imagine that? I mean, it's one thing to do that on a subway or a trolley, but, seriously, on a goddamn plane? How the fuck does the stewardess get her little drink cart full of 8 ounce Frescas down the pike?

* So they're not going to bury Michael Jackson at NeverLand. Apparently they've decided that, since he's basically human, a cemetery would be more appropriate.

* The window unit in this room that came with our house is called "The Power Miser." At least it's not called "The Tight-Fisted, Conk-Faced Jew."

* My wife is attending a book lecture at the local library right now. When are we not going to be the youngest people at public events (folk music concerts, Gilbert & Sullivan operas, early music ensembles, the legitimate theatre, etc...)?

* Why is Al Sharpton on TV pretending he gives a shit about the death of Michael Jackson? I realize Jackson is black and dead, but, to the best of my knowledge, he wasn't shot by a white police officer.

* Why is there a zit on my upper left cheek? I mean, haven't we done this already?

* Why did I get that Master's degree again?

* Why does Pandora.com play three songs you love followed by five songs you like followed by sixty-seven you can't fucking stand?

* It's impossible to take the British seriously. I mean, "fairy cakes?" Come on-- you didn't seriously used to be the supreme imperial world power, did you?

* I don't know what I'm more afraid of-- collapsing all alone and dying with absolutely no one to help me, or collapsing in front of an idiot who breaks my entire ribcage at a completely inept attempt at CPR and I wind up dying anyway, or collapsing in front of a group of idiots who do nothing but watch me flop around like a fish on the floor.

* I love Gilbert & Sullivan, dressing up in fine clothes, and talking about my feelings. I think God forgot to install that Gay Pentium chip.

* I'm only truly happy when I'm eating food with a sodium content of at least 1000mg.

* Do you remember when Facebook didn't suck hogsdick?

* I haven't ever been seriously punched in the face. It's going to happen one day, though. I keep waiting.

* Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to write and publish a second book. I highly doubt I will, and I think I'm a failure because of that. Then I think of all the other assholes out there who've never published one. And I smile. So, I'm a failure, but a smiling one.

* Lots of times, I want to be on the street as an EMT again. I know it doesn't pay, but I don't care. Well, I do care, but I don't want to.

* I think iconography is funny. I can't stop making fun of it. I work in a church and they have these flags hanging from the ceiling and one of them depicts a book with a fish on top of it. I mean-- really? What the fuck does that mean? Do people pray to that? I'd feel dumb. "God bless you, book fish thing." Like, whatever.

* I know this young girl with the worst eczema I've ever seen. Her entire body looks like a lobster and she scratches herself incessantly, sometimes both hands disappear beneath the waistband of her shorts. I can't stop staring at her, I'm sure with thinly veiled disgust, and yet, I can't look at her without honestly wanting to vomit. Especially when she eats the skin flakes. I mean, isn't this what institutions were created for-- so we normal people wouldn't have to see that shit?

* I think the people who read my blog are the saintliest motherfuckers in the entire universe. Seriously-- you and my mom deserve a fucking medal.