For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking the course. It’s an online comedy school, and none of the jokes are funny. Quite honestly, I’m trying to get through it as quickly as possible, so I’m not even stopping to read the jokes.
The representative whom I talked to over the phone said I didn’t have to take it all at once. In other words, I could read a chapter here, a chapter there, and take a break between each day. For about a half hour at a time, I’ve been reading it before doing something else. So far, it has instructed me not to drive drunk, to watch out for pedestrians, to coast along wet streets and not slam the brakes, to watch out for my blind spots, to drive behind a reckless driver rather than in front of them: common sense stuff.
At the end of each chapter is a three-question quiz. Never have I taken an easier exam. I thought it would be harder. The hardest part is to read through each chapter because they’re brutally long and painfully dull.
Now I’m reading about street signs. In case I didn’t know, it said a STOP sign is red and octagonal and that a YIELD sign is white and triangular with a red border and the word YIELD in red in the middle. I can’t wait for that quiz.
At the end of the last chapter, one of the questions was:
Drunk driving is______.
a. illegal
b. fun
c. safe
d. all of the above
Most, if not all, of the questions are about as hard.
At the bottom of every quiz, it asks me to write the answer to one of my security questions, to prove I’m human I guess. To be honest, those are the most difficult of all. For whatever reason, I’m always forgetting the answers to them. Why do I have such a hard time remembering what my favorite rock band is? I guess because I have so many that I forgot which answer I’d given at the beginning of the course. Nor can I ever spell my mother’s maiden name correctly. And I don’t have a favorite pet name because I’ve never had a pet. I had to make one up which I couldn’t remember. Why do these organizations think every person has had a pet? Shouldn’t they consider weirdos like me?
But whatever. I have until late October to finish the course. If I don’t complete it by the deadline, my insurance will skyrocket.
On the curb in front of my apartment, I sat this morning, minding my business, with my headphones on, when from my left, a dude wearing a plastic helmet rolled past me on one of those motorized unicycles with no handles. How the hell was he able to balance himself going down the road on that thing? While I figured I would’ve eaten shit, somehow he stayed upright all the way down. That’s how I know that I’m stuck in the future, when I see those things, whatever they’re called. Maybe they just label them motorized unicycles because that’s what they are.
But yeah, here I am in the future. Thirty years ago, I never would’ve predicted civilians would be transporting themselves on things like that. They also get by on electric bikes, which I don’t understand the concept of. They’re somewhere in between a scooter and a regular bike. Are they for people who are too lazy to pedal a bicycle but not daring enough to ride at the speed of a scooter? Since I’ve never ridden one of them, and probably never will, I ask God why he has put pedals on an electric bike if no one has to use them.
There are also electric skateboards, which I understand. If I were to ride a skateboard, I wouldn’t want to propel it using my other foot. Instead, I would stand on it and have a motor propel me forward. A dude I see nearly every day, who’s about my age, maybe ten years younger, rides one. Whether he’s his son or a nephew, a boy who looks about seven years old rides it with him down my street. The boy hangs on to him by his leg. It’s absurdly dangerous, but he keeps on doing it. One of these days, the boy will fall off and injure himself badly, maybe even be maimed.
But it’s the future. There’s no present anymore. People aren’t satisfied with regular skateboards or regular bikes, etc. But the unicycle is a new one. Those were outmoded a hundred years ago, I thought, but somehow, they’ve made a comeback. Some weirdos ride along the sides of business streets on those things, sometimes without a helmet. And then teenagers ride those razor scooters that can speed up to twenty miles per hour, and they’re not wearing helmets either. It’s Mad Max world, which I’d never predicted would arrive in my lifetime.
The only thing I did predict when I was just a boy, around ten years old, was that everyone would get their own television channel. But I’m not completely accurate with that prediction because their channels aren’t yet streaming on TV services–but maybe they will at some point. There is such an invention as YouTube, where anyone can broadcast themselves. People make a living now, putting themselves on camera in their laptops and releasing episodes of them just looking at me and expressing their thoughts about anything. Some of these folks are actually entertaining me with their personalities, not all of them but some. How I didn’t predict the internet, just everyone having their own channel, I find it strange that I could predict one thing and not the other.
It’s hard to imagine what will come next as I use my phone to pay for coffee. People can now upload their driver’s licenses to their smartphones. How’s that going to work? Our social security cards are coming next. We’re slowly being sucked into our phones. Sooner or later, we’ll physically be trapped inside them. People will wonder what happened to Grandma Felicia. She’ll be stuck inside her phone with the rest of her information.
Nothing is more discouraging than having nothing to say, nothing to do except stare out a window at a coffee shop at listless people on a Tuesday morning. I took the week off from work, thank God, but I’m still thinking about it and what shitstorm I’ll come back to next Monday. But why worry now? Just enjoy the time off.
The coffee shop is crammed with customers. I waited twenty minutes for my coffee, and my cheese Danish was cold. It’s not really a coffee; it’s espresso with hazelnut syrup. I hate hazelnut usually, but they make it better here.
There’s nothing today except writing and walking. I’ll walk for five miles in the afternoon and listen to a podcast about football.
It’s that time of year again. I watched two games last night. One of them was a blowout from the first quarter, so I switched to the other game, which was, on the other hand, sort of competitive. The Washington Commanders upset the Cincinnati Bengals, who were a seven-point favorite in Cincinnati, mind you. The Bengals have a shitty defense, or at least no pass defense, so the rookie quarterback of the Commanders, Jayden Daniels, tossed it all over the yard on the Bengals and put up over thirty points by the end of the game. He’s playing like the rookie of the year so far, the Heisman Trophy winner who looks much better than the media darling Caleb Williams who was the first overall pick in the NFL draft this year.
Many experts had predicted that the Cincinnati Bengals would go to the Super Bowl because of their elite quarterback and wide receiver, but that doesn’t include their trashy defense. How will they beat anyone with that? Now they’re 0-3 with a narrow chance of making it to the playoffs. Statistics show that an NFL team has a 3-4% chance of getting there. It will take three more weeks before the Bengals make it back to five hundred even. That’s a long way away. My team, the Steelers, are 3-0 and could be 6-0 by the time the Bengals get to 3-3. I don’t like Cincinnati’s chances as of now, but you never know in this league.
There were many upsets over the weekend. I still can’t believe the Carolina Panthers, who were winless before Sunday with the Red Rifle at quarterback, who used to be a Cincinnati Bengal by the way, who got up from the couch and put on his uniform, beat the Las Vegas Raiders. He threw for over three hundred yards, 319 yards precisely, and three touchdowns. That’s damn impressive. The Raiders must not have watched any tape of the Red Rifle. He’s an old quarterback whom no one had expectations for. Not that I’m predicting that the Panthers will make the Super Bowl, let alone the playoffs, but it just proves that it has been an unpredictable season so far.
I would’ve never expected a 0-3 record for Joe Burrow and the Bengals. Maybe the so-called NFL experts should focus more on defenses and running games because those are the foundations of any football team from high school to the pros, instead of looking at teams based on how talented their quarterbacks are. But we live in the age of fantasy teams, where fantasy player points count over the actual X’s and O’s.
Anyway, the football week is over now. I’ll drag my feet through Tuesday and Wednesday before another football game on Thursday night between the Cowboys and Giants. Yawn. Both teams bore me. I’ll wait six more days before Sunday when the other games start and won’t know what I’ll do with myself until then besides getting a haircut before going back to work next week. The barbershop can’t be too crowded on a Tuesday. I’ll wait and see this afternoon after a five-mile walk in the heat.
My apartment manager invited me to a meet-n-mingle tomorrow night at the apartment complex. I don’t feel like going because I don’t socialize much, being rusty and all around people, and I get uncomfortable. It’s not that I don’t like them, but I just have no words, and I end up listening to someone ramble on about themselves, and I’m only partially listening, and when they ask me a question, I don’t have an answer because my mind was somewhere else in the first place. Staying inside will be better while meet-n-mingle is going on. Maybe I’ll visit for twenty minutes before moving on. She said the corporate people will show up too, as if I’d been anxiously waiting for them. What would I want with the corporate workers of this apartment complex? It wouldn’t matter if I’d never met them.
I awoke to the clock glowing in the guest room of my parents’ house at five in the morning, and it said the same time on my Apple Watch. I just know it’s an Orwellian world when there’s universal time, apparently with all the clocks around me. Those minutes change together between my work laptop and my iPhone for example. That’s a dangerous sign. Who’s controlling it? Who’s syncing the clocks with the same time?
It’s not everywhere though, thank God. For example, the clocks don’t match on the stove and microwave in my apartment. But what if they did? What if my appliances were online with clocks on them? There are stoves and microwaves out there that people can control through an app on their cell phones. They just have to sync them with the universal time. That’s an uncomfortable thought.
What happened to the days when no one had the right time, when a person couldn’t give it to me on the street? He would be a few minutes off. It’s not disturbing like now, such as how Google sends me articles on its news feed based on my interests. Google knows that I’m a football fan and feeds me information about the teams on its app. Google knows more about me than most people do. Even my parents don’t know as much about me as a fucking search engine does. And humans control search engines. God doesn’t. I would feel more comfortable if the holy spirit ran the internet over an evil tech nerd who hides his name.
But anyway, I drove to my parent’s house and saw a walker in their living room next to where my father sat in his leather chair, I thought because of his back pain, but instead he’d been having vertigo for almost a week. That would’ve driven me insane. I couldn’t imagine him living that way. He’d seen multiple doctors and was tested with MRIs and CAT scans. He’d seen neurologists and heart doctors. One of them told him to take vitamins. Another doctor told him to close his eyes and the vertigo would go away, but it didn’t.
What kind of quacks is he seeing? And they’ll bill him thousands of dollars. What a joke. What corruption. Doctors are overpaid to do nothing. My mom thought they didn’t know what they were doing, but I believed they did. They just didn’t want to deal with my father because his medical problems were too complicated. He has suffered from migraines his whole life, and no one has been able to cure him. And now he’s getting a handful of migraines each day, which I’m sure only worsens the vertigo.
He didn’t even join us for dinner. I went with my mother to a burger restaurant with a Hawaiian theme. I ate one that tasted like In-and-Out Burger, with Thousand Island dressing, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. I hadn’t been to that restaurant in over ten years, and I remembered the burgers were supposed to be bigger, although I bet they’d jacked the prices. How typical. My mother didn’t eat a burger, though. She had a strawberry salad, which sounded gross because it came with chicken. I can’t see myself eating strawberries with chicken, let alone with lettuce and balsamic strawberry vinaigrette.
The waiter came to our table wearing a face mask four years after the COVID-19 pandemic. He took our orders through a digital tablet, unlike most restaurants where the waiters had to memorize what everyone wanted. He just easily touched the screen, and the orders were probably transmitted to the kitchen.
My father stayed home, and he ordered something for us to pick up for him. He’d texted Mom and said he wanted a sandwich called the Toucan, which came with chicken and teriyaki sauce. My mom and I thought it sounded gross. There was something that made me sick about teriyaki sauce going with bread, like putting rice in a sandwich. I don’t think anyone has ever done that. Then again, my father has a strange taste. I always knew him that way.
I sat with them in the living room after dinner and watched a film called The Whale, starring Brendan Fraser from The Mummy movies, who looked as if he weighed over four hundred pounds for the role. It had to be makeup and CGI or something. There was no way he weighed that much in real life.
But anyway, as we watched the film, my father asked me, “Why do you have a bandaid on your head? Did you hurt yourself?”
I appreciated his concern, except I didn’t have a bandaid on my head. What was he talking about?
My mother even said, “What bandaid? There’s nothing on his head.”
“Oh,” he said. “It must be the glare.”
What glare? It was nine o’clock at night. It had to be his vertigo. I was too bothered by his visual hallucinations to watch the rest of the film, so I went to bed, hoping he would feel better the next day.
I bit my lip last week when I was asleep. I’d never done that before. I mean I’ve bitten my lip dozens of times in my life, but how does one bite his lip in his sleep? I heard the crunch even while I tripped over a white cloud and awoke immediately and felt the sting of a bitten lip. I tasted the blood leaking from the bite and knew, “Oh man, I’m going to feel this for several days now.” And I feel it still, sure enough after a week of my teeth chewing on it. Why do my teeth chomp on it constantly rather than letting it heal for God’s sake? Not only that, but I’ve had a canker sore near my upper lip for even longer, and it’s healing finally.
Not to mention, sores have been appearing on my nose and forehead for the past several weeks. My dad kept telling me that it was skin cancer.
“Go to a doctor right away,” he was saying.
My mother and I thought he was ridiculous. I chalked it up to stress which can do mysterious things to my body.
I don’t get hurt usually. I’ve never broken a bone in my forty-seven years, never put myself in the position unlike other people who injure themselves a lot. My mother wouldn’t let me play football when I was a boy.
“You’ll break your bones,” she would say, and she could’ve been right.
I went downhill skiing once and kept falling on my ass. I couldn’t stay upright when I slid down the snowy hill. I told myself this is the last time I’m doing this, and I’ve never been back. How could anyone enjoy it? Some people live for skiing. Some people don’t mind getting hurt. Some people get in many car accidents.
I panic at the thought of rear-ending someone on the highway at seventy miles per hour, the damage it would cause, how much I could injure those in front of me. So I keep both eyes on the road, my hands at ten and two, and not let things distract me, although I’ve done so in the past. I remember texting people on the highway, going past the speed limit. My thumbs pressed the keyboard on the screen while my knees steered the wheel. I stayed in my lane somehow after becoming quite skillful at driving from being a delivery driver for many years. That was just about everything I was good at. If there’s one thing I can brag about myself, it’s that I’m a hell of a driver. How can I drive so well that fast, keep my eyes on the road while reading text messages on my phone? I’ll go through phases where I’m scared in disbelief at how I could drive for several miles without even looking in front of me. Maybe I was looking actually but I never remembered. What a scary thought. It’s like driving home and forgetting how I got there.
I’ve done that too, like entering a room and forgetting my reason. It takes about five minutes until I realize why. I’ve been doing that since I was a child and always wondered about the phenomenon.
But anyway, I keep biting the sore on my lower lip as if it will make it heal when I’m making it only worse. It sucks when I’m eating food and my teeth crunch down on my lip, which happens every now and then. I wish there were a protector like a muzzle I could put on my lower lip and prevent that from happening.
My department holds meetings every Thursday morning, and at the beginning of every meeting, my team lead asks me and the rest of the team a question for an icebreaker to ease the tension (or try to). She asked what TV show is our comfort food, and the question was difficult because I don’t watch TV. I haven’t for decades except for NFL football, and the season lasts for only about five months out of every year. I don’t watch any programming anymore other than that because it influences me negatively. So I struggled for an answer, but I heard the other team members.
One of them, a grown man, brought up an anime series. Someone should eventually grow out of anime if there’s an appropriate age for that. But now that I look back, my college roommate watched it as well. I’d never heard about anime until he entered my life when I was twenty years old. Nothing against him or my coworker (he’s a nice guy)(they’re both nice guys), but why do people enjoy that stuff? I never understood it. The animation is poor, and I don’t get what’s going on. It reminds me of those old Speed Racer cartoons, where the characters remained still while their lips moved when they were talking.
When it was my turn, I gave them a somewhat honest answer, even though I lied. I said NFL football, which was true, and felt judged because no one before me had brought up sports of any kind. But I also said that I liked to watch YouTube, which was also true, but that I watched clips from Beavis and Butthead, which was a lie. I watched it religiously as a teenager but not anymore. No one laughed after I said it. There was dead silence. I worried, with how strict my company is when it comes to ethics and conduct, that I would be written up for saying the word “butthead.” But no one complained. I had to watch an ethics and conduct training video yesterday as part of the company’s policy, and I was already behind in my work, and that video that lasted an hour only pulled me further behind.
I can’t remember what other TV shows people brought up for the icebreaker. I didn’t know about a lot of them. One of the women brought up Law and Order. People still watch that show surprisingly enough. It appeals to me as much as anime, and I understand the appeal just as little. Whereas only kids should watch anime, only old people who stay in the house all day and play crossword puzzles out of the newspaper to keep their minds busy should watch Law and Order. The woman looked young, maybe late twenties. Then again, I don’t know what shows are popular now. The majority watches streaming services, not network TV, because network TV is lame. It has always been lame, nowadays especially. But how would I know if I don’t watch television exccpt for when football is on. The networks show ads for their programming, so I get to see what the next episode of Survivor will be. I can’t believe that shit is still on (the same with The Bachelor). People must be viewing it.
I stopped watching television a few years after college, so about 2003, with the promise to stop watching it like a diabetic who needed to stop eating sugar. It was only toxic to me. I used to catch myself sitting on the couch for too long, and I would feel like a bag of powdered donuts. When I would look in the mirror afterward, I would see a bag of donuts as well.
Hopefully the next time my team lead gives us an icebreaker, it’s a question I can feel comfortable answering. Most of them don’t. I don’t feel any better afterward.
I’ve kept a small corkboard for over twenty years with a paper on it that has withstood time. It’s a contract to myself that says, and I’ll paraphrase: I, Benjamin Talbot, shall write every day for the rest of my life until the day I die. And I signed it at the bottom with a black pen. It’s a miracle that the paper has remained on that corkboard with a thumbtack and that the paper hasn’t torn all the way throughout the years. But it has stains on it, wherever the stains had come from. They look like blood, sort of how dry blood would appear: a light brown blotch that I could’ve mistaken for coffee on the white paper. But how would I have spilled coffee on it in the same fluke as if I’d spilled blood on it?
The corkboard is in my apartment in Palm Springs. It’s in the kitchen next to my work desk, which I never sit at. It used to hang on one of the walls of my Hollywood apartment.
My friend at the time, in my twenties, came in one afternoon and saw it hanging there and said, “Wow. Look at this.”
I told him that it was a contract that I’d written to myself.
He read it and said, “You signed it?”
“Yessir. That’s my signature.”
“Where’s the date?” he said.
Oh shit. I’d never dated it. All signatures should come with a date. I didn’t even think of that. I smacked myself on the forehead. There’s no sense in composing a new contract now. I’ve signed it already. What’s done is done. How hastily I’d typed it out and printed it from my desktop computer back then, way back when printers actually worked and didn’t break down on me all the time. Oh well. At least the contract is still there, and it reminds me of my daily goals.
But it isn’t all that’s on the corkboard. I tacked a black-and-white photo of the one Ernest Hemingway above the contract. It’s of old Ernie, in about his fifties, standing in what appears to be the woods, grinning in a suit with both hands in his pockets. I hold that photograph near and dear after finding it in a Hemingway book that I’d bought from the Iliad Bookstore in North Hollywood. The book is called The Nick Adams Stories, which is a collection of shorts based on his character Nick Adams, who fancied fishing and camping. Most of the stories I’d read, you would guess, were of Nick Adams doing those things. The stories were pretty bland, very slow. Not much happened from beginning to end. Nevertheless, I respected his writing style enough to read his biography. How could anyone cram that much information about a person in one volume? Someone did. I found it interesting to find that photo in a book I’d bought for about two dollars, but I discovered a lot of incredible gems at that bookstore.
I know the feeling, waking up at one in the morning for no damn reason. It’s anxiety usually, but not last night. I lay awake and thought about horror movies.
A friend of mine in high school was sensitive like me, a little too overly sensitive. He couldn’t handle horror movies except a few, like Nightmare on Elm Street, only because he thought Freddy was cool. He wouldn’t watch any of them other than that. He came back from clogging class one weekend night and stayed at my house. It was a slumber party for the two of us. We lay on our stomachs right in front of the TV. My parents subscribed to HBO back then, and HBO showed schlocky horror films late at night through the week. I changed the channel to there, and it showed some guy who was trapped in a glass chamber while a bunch of scientists in lab coats watched him from the other side of the glass. We had no idea what the film was about since we’d caught the middle of it, but the bad guys (I guessed they were) observed the guy yelling at them to let him out. But they didn’t. The main bad guy nodded his head at one of the other people in the room. She flicked a switch, which triggered some sensor in the glass chamber, and the guy’s head exploded. I immediately started laughing. There’s something about a person’s head exploding in a cheap horror film that always makes me laugh, like watching a sledgehammer to a watermelon and the pulp bursting out. I laughed so hard that I started punching the carpet. But my friend didn’t think it was amusing.
“Dude, turn this off,” he said.
“No way,” I said. “This is hilarious.”
“No it’s not,” he said. “It’s not funny.” He was too damn sensitive. “Just turn it off, dude.”
“Okay, fine,” I said.
So I switched over to Cinemax, another channel my parents used to pay every month for, and it showed a movie with a steamy sex scene. My friend didn’t object to that of course. Neither of us did. The man and woman were engaging in foreplay.
“This is sweet,” my friend said.
We were waiting for the nudity to come, but a huge power drill impaled the man from the woman’s stomach and drilled him to pieces.
I started laughing again, but my friend didn’t think that was funny either, so he told me to turn it off as well. I wasn’t laughing at the cheap effects of the film per se, but also my friend’s reaction. That was the main reason for watching those films with him or any other friend. I always waited for their reactions, something I miss.
My insomnia may have come from the licorice root I took yesterday. What if it kept me up all night? The internet says the side effects from long-term use are high blood pressure, low potassium, edema, heart problems, kidney problems, hormonal imbalance, headaches, and liver problems. That’s a lot, which means it’s working.
I went outside this morning and it was a bit chilly for Palm Springs standards. Still dark outside before six. I get up at 4:30 a.m. That’s when my alarm goes off. But I don’t get out of bed until sometime after five. Four thirty is too early. And I was wearing my T-shirt, shorts, and sandals with my backpack.
I look forward to the cold after about five months of insufferable heat that went as high as one-hundred-and-twenty degrees in this valley. It’s time for the weather to start cooling down. I used to live in Pittsburgh in my elementary school years where it reached freezing temperatures. We expected snow. Our pipes froze in the winter one year. I can’t remember what it did to our house. That was as extreme as it got for me, those five years in Pittsburgh before my father moved us to Florida, where it was warm all year. And then he moved us to California three years later. The weather was warm for most months, but it would get sort of cold in the winter.
One year it actually snowed in the town we lived in back in 1999. It was newsworthy because it hadn’t snowed there since 1976 before I was born. Funny to believe the snow fell for only a day in 1999 before it cleared up again. Needless to say, I’m not used to snow. I’ve forgotten what it’s like after almost thirty years. It has been that long. Yikes. I’m a warm-weathered person, but aren’t most of us? Who appreciates the cold? On the flip side, who appreciates the heat? Don’t we all wish we were living in Santa Barbara where it’s seventy-something degrees all year round? Except for the mornings when it drops to about fifty degrees, which is still tolerable. I can sleep well at that temperature, unlike in the summer months in Palm Springs when the heat is about ninety-eight degrees in the middle of the night.
I don’t get sick often anymore. I would when I was a child when the weather changed. I would get the flu every winter in Pittsburgh, and it would last about a week with a fever and congestion. The flu would return, or just a cold, when the weather was warm again around March or April. I don’t get sick much anymore for some reason, maybe once every two years, if that. I still get migraines if it’s too hot, but I wouldn’t blame the weather this morning. I don’t know what to blame it on other than the possibility that I may have slept wrong. But at least I slept. That’s all I can ask for.
My father sat in his kitchen, and we talked about football because we were going to spend all day watching games on TV. Sadly he got the names wrong of the football players and the teams as well.
“Who’s Baltimore playing?” he asked.
I’d told him about five minutes ago. I almost yelled at him.
“They’re playing the Raiders, Dad. I thought I told you five minutes ago.”
“That’s right,” he said.
The conversation went on, and he kept getting people’s names wrong. I thought about looking up dementia on the internet, but all that would’ve done was make me more worried. I should’ve learned my lesson after all those years of trying to diagnose myself after looking up diseases online, which was never a good idea for a hypochondriac like me, and that was what I wanted to do for my father.
We sat together in the living room and watched the games. He kept getting the players’ names wrong on the television before he went and picked up pizza.
“Where’s it from?” I asked. I was hoping Domino’s at least.
“It’s from WinCo,” he said.
“WinCo? Isn’t that like a grocery store for poor people?” I couldn’t imagine the pizza tasting any good.
“We order from there all the time,” he said.
What was with my parents to where they would order pizza from a place like that? Pizza, which I hold sacred to me, has to come from a reputable place. When I used to live in Los Angeles, there were great pizza places abound. A New Yorker would argue with me and say there were hardly any good pizza restaurants in that city. But a New Yorker could be snobbish about pizza anyway. Don’t ever mention pineapples when they’re around. Since I don’t hold Coachella Valley as a pizza mecca, I gave up and said, “Okay, we can order from there.” They may as well have ordered from Walmart if Walmart served pizza, which they don’t, but that was the regard I held for WinCo. I’ve never been inside one, but I can only imagine something different from Whole Foods.
When he went to pick up the pizza, I sat in the room with my mother, who was focusing on her iPad on the couch, and I asked her, “What’s with Dad? I know I asked you before about his cognitive functioning.”
And she said, “We’re both losing our minds. You’ll have to watch us because we’re forgetting things more often. Both of us worry about dementia. That’s why I do these crossword puzzles all the time, and your dad spends all day looking up ancestors online to keep his mind going. He doesn’t even bother helping with your financial future because he’s afraid he’ll make mistakes. We don’t have too much to worry about now, but when we don’t know how to start the car, you should be really concerned.”
I worried the time would come sooner than later. They’re knocking on the door of their eighties.
“I can’t sleep much anymore,” she said. “I was drinking cherry tart juice and chamomile tea with licorice root to fall asleep. Everything helped except the licorice root was making me burn too much body fat, so my skin began to sag. I had to stop taking it because I was losing too much weight.”
Wait. Licorice root? It burns fat? What the hell? Sign me up. I ordered it on Amazon right away.
A woman using a walker rolled into the coffee shop this morning, and I thought about my mother and how eventually she’ll have to use one. She has beaten herself up after playing tennis for so many years. She fell the other day on the court. The tread on her shoes was wearing out. I worry about her playing. She’s a klutz. I love her, but she’s still a klutz, and a klutz at her age is playing with fire on the tennis court. To think she’ll have to give up her favorite love someday depresses me. I dwelled over that when she had back surgery six years ago, when she was in the hospital for a week. I had a rough time with her in there. I couldn’t stand to see her unconscious in a hospital bed, so I stayed away from there as much as I could and tried to enjoy the air in Venice Beach near where she stayed. After that long, I still have vivid memories of when she was there and how hard it was for me to cope. But they’re still around, and that’s all that matters. And the pizza from WinCo was actually very good.
