A splash of evil crept into my soul one day this week when I was walking down the sidewalk. I didn’t know where it had come from. It appeared like an eclipse, totally unexpected, but it went away.

A man in the coffee shop line smiled at me and kept looking around himself, holding his iPad in both hands in front of his body. What does he want from me? What organization is he working for? I better hide.

The line is long. These people ought to know that they can place mobile orders on their phones. That’s what I do. I live half a mile from this coffee shop, and my cold brew and eggs are ready by the time I walk here. Yet these people didn’t get the memo.

The Adderall kicked in. It’s six in the morning, and I’m wide awake. The pharmacy didn’t have my medication until yesterday, so I’d been out of it since Saturday. How did I survive? I need it for attention. Some days I forget, which shows how ineffective the Adderall can be. But I take it anyway for my attention deficit disorder. I’m not ashamed to admit it because I believe that most people need the stuff. Too many people are plagued by a short attention span. Too much stimuli. I look out this dirty window with water stains on it and see a plethora of shops with letters on them, words and letters everywhere in town, and numbers too on signs and such. I have to get away to see nature, to avoid all this information.

Anyway, I still haven’t called the court to find out about my speeding ticket, which is supposed to come in the mail. The idiot cop had written my address from Hollywood on my citation, but I don’t live there anymore, and he’d pulled me over a few miles from home. My new address is on my insurance and registration card. No one ever said a cop is supposed to graduate from MIT, but he should’ve at least politely asked where I lived, and I would’ve told him the truth.

I still have post-traumatic stress from that night, which was less than a week ago. Why did I drive close to ninety miles per hour? Where was my head when I was driving? I was thinking a million thoughts other than how fast I was going. My foot kept pressing the pedal without my awareness. Now I have to pay the fine and attend traffic school. I’ve gone to comedy traffic school a few times. The people who instructed it were not funny. This was before COVID, long before COVID. I had to drive to an economy office building and sit for eight hours, where I studied all the different traffic laws. The instructors read jokes from their notes. They ordered pizza too. There were definitely coffee and donuts.

I can take traffic school online now in my apartment. I don’t know how the court will see that I attended. Nevertheless, I can’t have the points or my insurance will skyrocket, so I must endure the long, painful process. That’s the point, isn’t it? To keep me from speeding again. They press the issue. It’s on my conscience every time I sit behind the wheel.

Now I obey all traffic laws. I drove to my parents’ house on the day after the cop had pulled me over and kept my eyes on both the road and Google Maps on Apple Carplay. Google Maps helps because it tells me the speed limit on each road. If the limit was forty five I would drive that fast and nothing more. It’s hard because it’s tempting to drive over the limit, but that moment made me hypervigilant. I looked all around myself for cops lurking on the freeway shoulder or on main roads. I crept below twenty-five miles per hour in a school zone, even though school was out. It’s July, for chrissakes, but I still went as slow. I have nothing to fear. Speeding tickets come every ten years or so. The last time a cop pulled me over was in the past decade for speeding in a thirty-five-mile-her-hour zone. I was going fifty. The cop got irritated because I was playing music while he was trying to talk over it. I was so nervous that I forgot the music was even on.

I’m not counting the many parking tickets I received in Los Angeles County. Parking enforcers are the most efficient officers of all because the parking situation in that city is such a mess. There’s a parking meter in just about every space on just about every street. People can’t park anywhere for long because of the number of cars versus the number of streets. I spent two dollars to park for an hour.

I drive only a few days a week, so I don’t have to worry a lot about traffic and parking violations. But man, that last speeding ticket hit me hard. I don’t want to drive again.