Non-fiction

My Mold

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I grew up at the perfect time, in the nineteen nineties. I was thirteen when the decade started and twenty-three when it all ended, and I can’t complain one bit about that epoch. The music connected genres, the films were more original than now, the presidency was just right. As a freshman in high school, I saw the Nirvana video for the first time: “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I sat in my parents’ house, on the floor of their living room when it appeared on MTV. I’d never heard music like that before. And they played Alice in Chains on Headbanger’s Ball. I was listening to hip-hop back then as well, when it was at its most classic, the golden era of the genre. Music is magic. Musicians pluck sounds out of the air and form melodies.

Yes, I had it great. I was from Generation X, before millenials took over the land. I didn’t quite understand their pop culture. The bands didn’t seem as genuine or meaningful. Everything became plastic and digital. Apple introduced the iPod. Record stores became defunct. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it, but they forced me to conform. Now I’m like one of the millenials, listening to my music on my phone.

The nineties had a type of rebellious energy against corporations. People dressed like slobs, and society accepted them for who they were. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Rage Against the Machine rebelled against the eighties attitude, which was to wear big hair and button up their clothing, to sell out as much as possible, when in the nineties you turned your back on your integrity if you sold out. I wore Cavariccis to school in the eighties with a mullet because I didn’t know any better. How was I to know that grunge music was going to take over fashion and the music industry? I was able to throw away those Cavariccis and wear basic jeans with holes in the knees and grow my hair out to a normal, respectable style (with sideburns). Grunge taught me to be my own version of normal, for as weird of a kid as I was.

Yes, I believe I was born at the perfect time, but that’s what any person would say between those years from adolescence to young adulthood, when the music sounded its sweetest, when the films were their truest, when fashion made the most sense. Maybe we look back and cringe at our clothes and hairstyles, but at the time it felt just right. I still wear jeans and cardigans. Fashion doesn’t make sense to me now, and I have no idea what the music sounds like or how the films are. I gave up. I had my time and that was the nineties. I have Jane’s Addiction on my phone, with Wu-Tang, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins…. It’s hard to believe that people from Gen-Z don’t even know those bands. It makes me feel old, of course, but anyone who’s over eighteen, who’s just now listening to those bands for the first time, should’ve known them earlier if they claim to be music experts.

But that’s just little old me, stuck in a time machine, who doesn’t want to leave it. I’ll never crawl out of the nineties. It was the best time for me. Clinton was president. There were no wars (okay, a little civil unrest, but nothing like now). There was no social media. It fit my mold, and that goes for everyone. I’ve met people, people younger than me, who swore by Blink-182 and Linkin Park, and I didn’t get the appeal. But that’s okay. That was their time for music. I’d officially gotten old by twenty-three. We don’t have to set the boundary at each decade. One movement in the nineties can spill into the two-thousands. But for the sake of this piece, we’ll keep it within those parameters because I look at my own life and feel that everything had changed for the worse once the nineties were over.

Non-fiction

My Drunken Nights

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I look back at all my drunken nights and can’t count on one finger a single one that stands out. They all come together in a blur, a long, significant blur.

It started when I was twenty-one and ended when I was forty-one. I drank almost every day from the time I was twenty-six to the day that I retired on August 15, 2019. I thought that was the date, but it was nothing official. I used to get blackout drunk with my friends in Hollywood when they were still around. We did shots of anything, and I drank mostly beers, domestic beers, not the fancy imported kind that really wasn’t imported. If you travel to Belgium and drink the Americanized Belgian beer, you’ll get ridiculed. My parents told me you’re supposed to drink a different beer over there. I’ll probably never fly to Belgium anyway.

But I drank whatever came my way like Long Island Iced Teas from a cowboy bar in West Hollywood because the cocktail came in a flower vase with a long thick straw sticking out of the top. The bar had a mechanical bull that I would never ride, and I wasn’t interested in anyone who rode the thing. All I wanted was to get obliterated because life was hard, and I wanted to make it easier.

When my friends went away when I was in my thirties, I was left alone to drink alcohol and smoke hash, mostly weed but hash sometimes. I had acquaintances, not friends. We would drink and get high together, but that was all we really had in common. I respected my time alone with my drinking but also would venture to the bar down the street from my apartment.

One night, when I was in my late thirties, I can’t remember what age exactly, I was crossing Hollywood Boulevard when a young dude on crack punched me in the mouth. It was a sucker punch. I was high already after smoking a spliff in my apartment. The kid walked away, still staring me down and cursing me. I never retaliated, which I should’ve done, but I was too dazed that a stranger would actually hit me at one in the morning on an empty Hollywood street. I continued walking to the bar because I wanted to drink into a blackout after what that kid had done to me.

I told everyone in the bar what had happened, and they were all amazed too.

“I just got punched in the face,” I said.

“By who?” they asked.

“Some kid on crack,” I said.

Of course it might not have been crack. It could’ve been acid for all I knew, or crystal meth. All the more reason not to have hit him back. The kid could’ve felt nothing and been a superhero with super strengths, and a punch to his jaw might not have even fazed him. He could’ve done something worse to me.

I told the bouncer.

“Where is he?” he asked. “I’ll take him down.”

But I couldn’t tell him. He could’ve been anywhere in Hollywood, sucker-punching other drunk fools like me, around the time when I quit drinking. I think less than a year went by when I ended up in rehab and reached an age where I couldn’t do it anymore.

I cringe at the things I’d done as a drunk, like the time I raised hell at my twenty-year high school reunion. I regret ever getting kicked out of a local bar in my hometown. I don’t talk to my high school alumni anymore, ever since that happened. It was a visceral reaction to the way my alums were acting that night, and the alcohol only freed my inhibitions to attack people the way I did. I don’t remember anything. People on social media had to inform me of what I did, and I wanted to hide somewhere for good.

I don’t have to worry anymore. Those days are behind me now. I stare reality right in the face and deal with it head-on.

Non-fiction

What a Fortune

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I used to use Tarot cards for writing. I heard Stephen King did the same thing for his books, but that could be a lie. Tarot cards are good for writing because of the imagery in the illustrations on each card. Each card has meaning, whether you pick up the Three of Cups or the King of Swords.

I remember reading a book about the Tarot and how you can formulate scenes by using the deck of cards. The four different symbols represent something different. Cups, which can hold water, represent emotion. Swords, which are sharp, represent intellect. Wands represent the arts and creativity. And, finally, the coins, as you would guess, represent money and fortune. So, if someone pulls out a Two of Coins, a King of Wands, and an Ace of Cups, you could say that character is poor because you drew only the Two of Coins from the deck, but he’s also massively creative because you drew the King of Wands, and can also handle his emotions because you drew the Ace of Cups. How would that translate in a scene? Suppose he gets into an argument with his spouse about money. He doesn’t have much, which spawns a fight. But he can handle it because he can manage his emotions, and he controls the argument in an artful way. That might be a poor example because I just thought of it, but it’s something to try if a writer feels stuck in a scene or what to write about if he wants to write a story.

I would write a scene using a single Tarot card. For instance, the Moon. There’s a Moon card. I don’t know right off to bat what the Moon card represents, nor the Tower card.

A friend of mine wanted me to give his fortune over the phone a long time ago. I did my best, and I remember I drew the Tower from the deck, and I had to read the meaning from the little book that came with it. The Tower card shows a fire at the tower, with people falling off of it. So you know it represents something dark and foreboding, something my friend didn’t want to hear. I read what the book said, and his exuberance fell off like the people on the tower. He didn’t want his fortune read any longer. I didn’t know what he was expecting.

The Tarot isn’t full of just happiness and good fortune. It could draw something completely dark. For example, let’s say you pull three cards, and they’re all lower cards such as the Two of Cups, the Three of Wands, and the Four of Swords. If you’re doing a character study, that’s a weak character. His intellect is low. He can’t handle his emotions. And he’s not very inspired. That’s all for the moment though. If you’re writing a scene with those cards, the character might make a dumb decision and lose control of his anger and isn’t motivated enough to fix the situation. Maybe he robs a bank, and he starts shooting people because his anger takes over after his plans are ruined, and he even shoots at the cops when they show up. I just thought of that example. I’m sure you can think of something better. My point is the possibilities are endless with the use of Tarot cards. I recommend them to anyone who wants to jumpstart a story or a character study, anything to get into a rhythm.

Non-fiction

Desert Creatures

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Here in this desert are plenty of animals. I never saw them when I was living in Los Angeles. I’ve seen roadrunners. They’re much smaller than the one in the cartoon, who’s the same size as Wile E. Coyote. Real ones are about the size of a robin but a little larger, with the long tail sticking up in the air. They can barely fly. They leap and glide a little before they land back down to the earth. I see them more in Indio than in Palm Springs. They must like the golf courses where ducks and geese settle along the small lakes near the fairways. I nearly hit one with my car once and would’ve felt guilty. Who wants to kill a harmless roadrunner?

I’ve also seen many hummingbirds flying around and sucking nectar. Such beautiful beings. I saw a green one yesterday. I was in the parking lot of a shopping center. The rain had just stopped. I could smell the water on the concrete while I sat on the curb and saw the hummingbird hovering in the air above me. It darted to the tree and disappeared. I listened to the cicadas buzzing in the tree. I thought it was the lights in the parking lot.

I’ve never come across any deadly creatures such as ratlesnakes or mountain lions. Thank God. There’s a reason I don’t go hiking in this area. I heard the desert is full of those predators. If I ever see one, I’ll run in the opposite direction. I won’t stop and marvel at their beauty. I would rather die some other way.

My apartment is full of insects I’d never seen before. One morning, when I left to walk to the coffee shop, I noticed a pink worm crawling along the wall next to my door. Pink. I’d seen many worms in my life, especially in my childhood, but never one with the color pink, which scared me. I don’t like to see creatures I’m not familiar with. The worm fell off the wall and landed on the ground, where it kept crawling away to hide from me. If I ever see one in my apartment, I’ll freak out. I was pretty sure it was a worm but not positive. It had sections like a centipede, which really disturbed me. There are other insects crawling in my apartment. I kill some when I get the chance.

Otherwise, I look for other animals in this desert town and hope to find something unique. I’m tired of pigeons. I want to see more exotic birds and mammals as well.

Non-fiction

House Party

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I’d never thrown a party except one. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen, even twenty. No, it couldn’t have been twenty because my friend had enlisted in the army, and he was the one who’d incited it.

We were in a honky tonk bar in the boondocks. My friend was dressed like a cowboy, and over ninety percent of the crowd in that bar, you would’ve imagined, wore cowboy hats, Wranglers, and boots. It was karaoke night at the Cadillac Ranch. My friend, who’d been drinking and square dancing all night, got up on stage full of sweat, pointed at me, and announced through the microphone, “Ben is throwing a party.”

The crowd followed his finger toward me. I didn’t know it until then that I was throwing one. It scared me. Who knew who would show up?

After he came down from the stage, I asked him, “What’re we going to do?”

“I got it all figured out,” he said. “We’ll have someone over twenty-one buy the drinks, and we’ll go back to your place right now before anyone shows up.”

Somehow the partygoers found out my address. We raced there before anyone else did to get the house ready. My parents were out of town, visiting my grandma for the weekend, so I knew they wouldn’t come home. The guests started piling into the house. Two of them carried in one beer keg after another. I was getting nervous.

The cowboys and cowgirls started showing up in droves. Before I knew it, the whole house was filled with drunk people from Cadillac Ranch. I no longer wanted them there. I didn’t want them there from the beginning, maybe just the women.

Some of them started talking to me. They’d ignored me at the bar, but because I’d thrown the party at my parents’ house I was now the center of attention.

A few suspicious men showed up not dressed like cowboys. They wore white t-shirts, and their heads were shaved with cigarettes tucked at the top of their ears. They didn’t look like they’d come to party. Quite the opposite. They hung out near the front door, looking around at the party.

I kept my eye on them while I was drinking beer. One of them went outside. The other one followed. They didn’t look like they were leaving either.

I peeked through the curtains of the dining room window to the front yard. They stood under an oak tree, face to face, very close to each other. I didn’t think they were exchanging pleasantries, so I went out there to see what was going on.

One of them shoved the other one and said, “You want to go right now?”

“Let’s do it, sucker.”

I had to stop it before things would escalate, but both of them could’ve taken me down. “Hey, what’re you guys doing?” I said.

“Ain’t none of your business,” one of them said.

I couldn’t tell the two of them apart.

People could smell a fight from far away, so they started leaving the inside of my house to watch the event in the front yard. I wished they would’ve walked back in. Now I worried about the police showing up. If that would’ve happened, who knows what my dad would’ve said when they came home and found out that their only son had been arrested for disturbing the peace? Not to mention lawsuits if one of them got badly injured.

I approached them and got close to them as they brushed their chests against each other and eyed each other down. One of them threw a punch across the other one’s face, and the other one took him down in a wrestling move. They started rolling around on my mother’s lawn, punching each other.

The party gathered in a circle to watch the fight and cheered the fighters on.

“Get him.”

“Knock him out.”

“Kick his ass.”

They were animals. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t just fall to the lawn and join them, trying to break it up. All I worried about was the damage they would’ve caused to my parents’ property and if one of them was killed. I jumped in anyway, even though both of those guys could’ve taken me in one punch. I didn’t put up much of a fight, trying to break it up.

“Out of my way,” one of them said.

A stray fist caught me in the ear. I grabbed my ear and winced.

Another dude jumped in to try to break it up, a big nasty cowboy, well over six feet, had to be a linebacker of some sort. “I got ’em,” he said.

I stood and brushed the dirt off my jeans. The big strong man was able to tear those thugs apart from each other. In the moonlight, I could see their faces were red with welts. They would soon be black and blue all over. They breathed hard and tried to catch their breaths. Blood was leaking from their nostrils.

The circle broke once the fight was over, and everyone went back inside. That was when I decided to yell at everyone to go home, so I did it while people were in the living room and the kitchen. Some of them were even in my bedroom, making out on my bed. I went through the house and yelled at random people to get the hell out. I’d never raised my voice at strangers like that before, but I was furious and had to get them out of there before the cops would come. And they could tell how angry I was by my face and the sound of my voice.

The droves of people started leaving.

My friend stood by my side. “Sorry, dude,” he said.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I said.

That was the last party I ever threw, but I would go to many house parties after that but never cause a disruption like those two idiots in my mother’s front yard.

Non-fiction

My Cars

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My car is a 2019 Toyota CH-R, a limited edition vehicle, meaning they don’t make it anymore, with forty thousand miles so far. You would think the car would be worth a lot because they’ve discontinued manufacturing it, also because I hardly ever drive it, maybe twice a week, to see my parents, who live about eighteen miles from my apartment in Palm Springs. Most people commute in their vehicles, but I work from home, so I get to save money from those absurd gas prices. I love my car, even if I don’t drive it often.

The CH-R is so much better than my Hyundai Accent, the car I traded it in for. Sure, the Hyundai had a one-hundred-thousand mile warranty, and I never had to bring it to the shop, but damn, what an ugly car, all boxy, no Apple Carplay like my CH-R has, absolutely no gadgets to hang its hat on, just a basic car that got me to work and back when I had an office job. I can’t remember how long I’d driven that car. Those were forgettable years.

The car I had before the Hyundai was a Mazda 3. That thing could pick up speed like you wouldn’t believe up steep hills. But I drove it into the ground for my delivery job through the front half of the last decade. My ex-girlfriend said it looked like an owl, a silver owl. I had to drive that owl to the dealership too many times and spent thousands of dollars on repairs. The manager at the dealership wouldn’t do me any favors either. I complained to him once, and he claimed I was threatening him by saying that I wouldn’t come back. What a horrible visit. But waiting for them to repair that lemon was worse. Is there a more boring place to spend the day?

Before the Mazda, I drove a white Honda Civic after I graduated from college. That thing lasted almost eight years until the transmission slipped. I had to choose between a new car and a new transmission. I chose the Mazda. There were already over fifty thousand miles on the Honda. The value had dropped immensely, and the car was full of spilled drinks and cigarette ash.

But that car held a lot of memories. I remember all those nights driving drunk or high, things I shouldn’t have done. But I was young and stupid. Of course I would’ve done those things. I don’t do them anymore. I’m sober. That car held twice as many memories as any of the cars I’d owned after that or before it. I woke up one morning behind the wheel when I was about twenty-four years old, parked on the side of my parents’ house with a beefy bouncer asleep on the passenger side. I’d blacked out and forgotten how I’d gotten there or how the bouncer ended up in my car.

I won’t say that the Honda Civic was my favorite. It wasn’t my least favorite either. That medal goes to the bronze Buick my uncle gave me for free. That jalopy was from the eighties, and it already smelled like tobacco from the moment it was mine. This was back in 1995. A car had smashed its side from a hit-and-run, and so the whole driver’s side was totaled. I had to get in from the passenger side and crawl over the parking brake. I drove that car for three years, I want to say, before I switched to a used Honda CRX, a hatchback that most people probably don’t remember. I bought it for under a thousand dollars. That sounded like a great deal at the time until the car had stalled and lost its engine. I was stranded on a Los Angeles freeway. I know nothing about cars, so I couldn’t say I remember what the exact problem was. All I know is that I kept that car for under two years and didn’t have one for a while until I had the Civic.

Before the Buick, I drove my mother’s Honda Accord in my junior and senior years of high school. I had to drop her off at her office before I drove to school to avoid having to take the school bus. What a hassle to have to drive her to work, but it sure beat the alternative, which was to ride the school bus as a junior, or even worse, a senior, because only losers did that. Plus, without my mother’s Accord, I couldn’t drive to lunch with my friends. I would’ve had to continue eating cafeteria food like in my first two years of high school.

Cars saved me from a lot of trouble but also caused a lot of problems. They weren’t always convenient. I would tend to get nails in my tires. I don’t know why, but it seems to happen about twice a year while other people seem to never have that happen to them. But driving a jalopy is better than nothing at all. What’s worse than riding the city bus as far as transportation goes?

Non-fiction

What Excuses?

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I’ve heard people say that they don’t have time to write, or that they’ve found time to write, finally, now that school is over or their kids have gone off to college when they could’ve started much earlier. I’ve heard people say that they don’t have time to write because their jobs have bogged them down. If they just had time, they would begin writing that novel they’ve been thinking about every day for ten years.

The days are long, so long that I find myself trying to do something with my free time. I go for walks, but I can only walk so far before I get bored and tired. And yet my free time is still available. Maybe that’s just me, and other people really don’t have free time. But they complain that they don’t have the time to create, and I tell them to find time, whether it’s at one in the afternoon or one in the morning. They’ll find themselves with nothing to do. And what do they do with that time? They watch television, the devil’s invention, because they’re too tired from work or parenting or both, or they were out too late last night partying, and they’re trying to recuperate.

Meanwhile, time keeps passing by, collecting seconds and minutes and hours. Just a little each day goes far: one hour today, one hour tomorrow, two hours the next day and so on. It’s up to them what they choose to do with their time. And yes, things take a while to develop. It took me seven years to write my first manuscript. It didn’t go anywhere. It’s still on my shelf, and I don’t plan to do anything with it because it was really my first crack at a novel. My first actual manuscript was really a draft. It was never finished. It needed several subsequent drafts for me to really develop. That took me like a year if I can remember. That was over fifteen years ago.

I remember around then I was writing short stories and wasn’t planning to take them anywhere. A friend hooked me up with an editor when I was in my early thirties. She looked at the copy and refused to work on it because she was afraid she would charge me too much. That was how much work was needed to be done with it. She said it was too raw and gave me the ten-thousand-hour speech. I’d already heard about the ten thousand hours. I think I’ve exceeded them by now. But anyway, it deprressed me to hear her say that, but it didn’t discourage me from continuing. I kept writing after that rejection, and eventually I got started on that first manuscript.

I sent it out to about forty-nine agents, and several of them rejected me. Actually, all of them rejected me because when I didn’t hear back from them, it might as well have been qualified as a rejection. It depressed me, but I could at least say I did it. This was after my psychiatrist yelled at me for not going out there and doing the hard work myself, because a family friend said he would help me, but he never did.

“He doesn’t care about you,” my psychiatrist said, and that was true. The family friend really didn’t. Otherwise, he would’ve really helped me. The point my psychiatrist was trying to make was that I would have to do all the heavy lifting, and no one was going to help, no matter how close that person was to my family.

I think a lot of people are afraid of that sort of pain, so they make excuses so as not to work toward their artistic visions. Therefore, they let themselves off the hook and blame other factors, even other people. In the end, the blame takes them nowhere. All the time they’d spent making excuses could’ve been more time spent creating. I could be wrong in all of this, but I think I’m right.

Non-fiction

The Annual Compliance Harassment Video

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I journal every morning as part of my morning routine. Paper isn’t my friend and never was. I’ve never enjoyed journaling, but it’s necessary like getting a checkup. You might get what I’m saying.

I journal to get my thoughts on paper like anyone does for the same reason. It’s better to do it that way than not to do it at all. Why am I sitting at this table and writing at six in the morning? Am I insane? Shouldn’t I be asleep right now? Maybe I should. But life doesn’t work that way. I woke up at one and then close to four in the morning before my alarm eventually went off at five in the morning. If I set my alarm for six, I could get more rest, but it doesn’t work that way as I said. I have too many worries.

My job, for instance, is a big stressor in my life. I worry about whom I have to call, and if they’re going to yell at me. I never know whom I’m going to get.

I had to watch a harassment training video yesterday brought to me by the HR department. It’s an annual compliance video they make me watch, full of bad actors who portray abusive employees at a company. The days are gone when you could date your coworkers. I guess I see the point from human resources. They want people to come to work without complications, but it doesn’t stop people from breaking the rules.

There was one scene where a transgender person posted a video on social media complaining that their coworker called them the wrong name because it was gender-specific. The training video said that what the transgender person did was right, posting the video on social media. I had to disagree. They should’ve complained to human resources instead of doing what they did, but that’s just me.

Every example, from sexual misconduct to racial insensitivity, ended up with the answer of reporting it to human resources. That was the big lesson learned through the hour-and-a-half-long video.

In one scene, a coworker told a joke involving a priest, a pregnant woman, and a Hispanic person to two other coworkers. A Hispanic lady walked by the room in the middle of the joke. The scene paused so that the voiceover person could explain that what the joke-teller was doing was wrong.

They continued the video right where the joke-teller delivered the punchline, “So the priest says, ‘What’s that speed bump doing there?'”

Everyone laughed except the Hispanic woman who walked by, rolling her eyes. I never got to hear the full joke, but speed bumps are typically funny. I laugh inside whenever I see a car hop one.

In another scene, a woman in her thirties, I would guess, showed an old man how to use the internet at work. After she helped him, she walked away and posted on social media that she was tired of helping old folks with technology and that they should retire already.

The video cut to the next scene, where the old man read what she’d posted and shook his head in offense. It was hard to believe that she would post something like that if she knew the old man followed her on there. I doubt he would’ve done anything anyway.

I felt guilty after watching it, even though I work remotely, not in the office, and I never even did anything wrong. I answered the questions to a quiz at the end of every scene correctly. They awarded me with a certificate at the end. It was painful to watch, but at least I didn’t have to do any work for an hour and a half.

Non-fiction

Life in the Desert

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It’s half past six in the morning in the Coachella Valley, and it’s already eighty-five degrees. The heat will climb to one-seventeen in the afternoon today. I walk in this oppressive weather every day to get exercise. It doesn’t fail to make me sweat. I had to wash my shorts on Sunday because they were drenched. People must’ve thought I’d wet myself.

I walked for two miles yesterday and had to stop for water at a liquor store at Palm Canyon and Vista Chino. They sold water for four dollars. I remember when water was close to free, and drinking fountains were everywhere. Now I find them only at the gym when I go.

People have to drink fancy water because they can’t handle water from the tap like they used to. They deem it unsafe. I don’t think it’s going to kill them. It’s advertised on the bottles now: 9.5 Ph alkaline water. Kind of like the protein argument. Just how much protein should a human consume in a day? How much alkaline does a person need?

I used to drink nothing but that type of water. I would drive through noisy traffic in Hollywood for several miles just to pick it up from a health food store on Sunset Boulevard, but I stopped doing it after a while. It wasn’t necessary. Grocery stores started selling all sorts of alkaline water. Now I think it’s a bunch of nonsense and buy any old water. I don’t even look at the brand except Aquafina: something is wrong with that water. I don’t know what it is.

Anyway, I carried my four-dollar water another two miles back to my apartment in Palm Springs, past a few homeless people in this town. One of them slept on the sidewalk. The cement could cook a steak, and he was sleeping on it. I thought his shoes were missing, but as I walked past him I saw that he was using them as a pillow. I didn’t have any change to give him, but it wasn’t change he needed. He needed a bed and a pillow, which I couldn’t offer either, but he was doing just fine without them.

If someone lives in the desert long enough, they adapt to the heat like a lizard. I made it home and took a cool shower. My air conditioner was still running. The thing won’t turn off because it’s set to AUTO at seventy-six degrees. It shuts off when the apartment cools to that temperature. The problem is it never gets that cool. It’s that hot outside. I should raise it to seventy-eight. Only then might it shut off, but I doubt it.

My bill for last month was over three hundred dollars. It could be worse for July. The weather is hotter now than it has ever been since I’ve lived here. I can’t wait until September when it might start cooling down. It’s supposed to lower to one hundred degrees by next week. That would be like spring all over again if it happens. I might actually wear pants.

Non-fiction

A Deep Cleaning

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It’s Tuesday, so it means I’m back to work after a day off yesterday. I went to the dentist for what I thought would be a filling replacement, but it turned out to be a deep cleaning.

I can say that I’ve never heard of one of those before. I mean I get a cleaning every six months, but I wasn’t prepared for a deep cleaning.

They shot me with novocaine on the whole right side of my mouth, which puzzled me because I’ve never had my gums numbed for just a cleaning. The needle injection hurt, so she told me to relax and breathe, which didn’t help the pain of the needle inserted into me. She told me to wait for five minutes for the numbness to take effect. In dentist time, that equates to about thirty minutes, so I lay in the dentist’s chair, feeling the right side of my mouth growing number and number while I was waiting for her to come back. I didn’t want to spend all day in there. It was already one o’clock in the afternoon, and my appointment was at twelve o’clock.

When she came in again, she told me they were ready for the cleaning. I thought it would take about a half hour for them to scrape my teeth and polish them and my gums, but it didn’t take more than five minutes.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she said.

I wondered why she had numbed my mouth after such a disappointing operation as that.

I followed the nurse to the receptionist desk to schedule the next cleaning. I assume the dentist will do the same thing to the whole left side of my mouth. We scheduled me to come back in two weeks.

“Which day of the week is that?” I asked.

“The doctor only works on Mondays.”

No wonder the place is always crowded. At least I would miss another day of work. I get to look forward to that.

I opened the door back outside to the blazing heat. It was 116 degrees yesterday. I walked an entire mile to my apartment. By the time I returned, the back of my shorts was covered in sweat. It appeared as if I had made an accident. I had to cover it with my shirt. Otherwise, people might judge me, but they judge me anyway. I went back outside because I had no other shorts that matched my shirt. It was navy blue, and my shorts were baby blue. Why do they call it baby blue? Babies aren’t blue. It says online that baby blue suggests tranquility or what is needed to calm a baby in a nursery. That makes sense.

Anyway, I wore the same shorts at the coffee shop. It was crowded as usual on a Monday afternoon, with the temperature the way it was. A lot of tourists had shown up for coffee, not necessarily coffee but juices. It’s too hot to drink coffee. Coffee is dehydrating. People would rather stay hydrated.

I went outside to take a break, and a guy stood on top of a rock and started doing what looked like Tai Chi. I thought he was going to fall off. I just watched him, waiting for it to happen, but he never did. He was lucky. I guess people are going insane from the heat.

I finished editing my manuscript and sent it off to my editor. By then, my mouth had lost its numbness, which was good because I couldn’t drink with half of my mouth numb. The juice spilled onto my shirt.

After I was done editing, I returned to a short story I had been working on for several months about sexual relationships. I’ll be done with that in about a day before I send it to my beta readers for critiques. Then I’ll begin a new story. I have no idea what it’s about. The short I’m working on is beyond ready. I just quit working on it to focus on my manuscript. The last time I touched the short was about two months ago. My manuscript is over two hundred and fifty pages with over ten short stories. They’re not very long compared to most short stories, and so it can afford to have twenty of them.

That was Monday. I get to live through another short week before next week, which will be another long five days. At least I’m not living in Greece, where they’ve introduced the six-day workweek. The workers will work 6.5 hours a day. It still doesn’t eliminate the fact that citizens of Greece will only get one day off a week.