Non-fiction

State of the Turkey Address

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My parents took me out to dinner for Thanksgiving at a bistro filled to capacity. We sat outside on the back patio among several other customers and ate a three-course meal, which started with an appetizer, followed by an entree, and lastly the dessert. I had to choose which appetizer first and almost decided on mushroom soup but went with the lobster ravioli instead. The odd thing about their special Thanksgiving menu was the lobster ravioli was an appetizer while the squash ravioli was an option for the entree. Seemed redundant. I wondered if anyone actually went with that combo.

When it came to the entree, the description of the oven-roasted turkey outmatched that of the short ribs because it was served with sprouts, gravy, green beans, stuffing, cranberries, mashed potatoes, and whipped sweet potatoes. No other entree lived up to that mixture of food. Everything sounded lovely, but the turkey. As much as I couldn’t stand turkey, I thought it couldn’t be too bland. After all, we were at a bistro, not at home, where the turkey could’ve been overcooked. So I ordered that.

The lobster ravioli came first after I’d gorged on three sourdough dinner rolls with butter. Three ravioli pouches stuffed with lobster were sitting in a lobster bisque with corn on top and three oval cherry tomatoes. It was unexciting, not as lively as its description, so I was a little disappointed.

I was nosy and peeked over at the table next to us as we waited a long time for the entrees to come and noticed the large plate of turkey and such that a young fella was eating, and I was starving for it.

The waiter came back to us. “Are you folks ready for dessert?”

We all looked at each other, confused since our entrees had never come.

“We haven’t had our entrees,” my father said.

The waiter looked lost. “I’ll check on it now,” he said.

We were nervous after he walked away.

“I don’t think he ever put our orders in,” I said.

“You could be right,” my mother said.

But he had to have since he’d brought our appetizers. Like I said, it was very busy there. Waiters rushed by us with plates of food across their arms. New waiters whom I’d seemed not to see before hurried past our table as we kept waiting, a new waiter every minute.

Our entrees finally came after an hour of sitting out there in the cold. We’d all ordered the turkey dinner. Our plates looked identical and beautiful like a Thanksgiving dinner should. The turkey meat didn’t look as plain and boring as Thanksgivings past, picturesque, not white but brown meat like thick filets of steak dressed in dark brown gravy, over a hill of mashed potatoes with a small dollop of bright orange sweet potatoes, a little cup of cherry red cranberry sauce, a few emerald green sprouts, and a green bean here and there.

I dove right into the turkey first on top with my humungous fork and couldn’t believe how good the meat tasted. Turkey had never tasted so good, not bland at all. Maybe the thick gravy gave it such a rich flavor. I couldn’t stop eating it and had to eat all of it, about a pound before I could get to the mashed potatoes, which didn’t taste all that great. Many other restaurants I’d been to had served much better mashed potatoes. It wasn’t buttered or anything, not even whipped, but a little chunky in parts. The sweet potatoes equaled the turkey in flavor. I wished there was more of it. Most of the plate was of the turkey. I was spoiled last night and left most of the plate empty.

They took the plates away, and we waited for the dessert. I ordered the peach cobbler. The last time I’d eaten any peach cobbler was last Fourth of July. My mother had bought it from Trader Joe’s, and it was rich and sweet. I really recommend it. The cobbler last night, however, tasted as if it was for a diabetic, a fake sweetness with a burnt crust, not at all delectable like the one at Trader Joe’s, with very little vanilla ice cream. I was very disappointed after eating possibly the best turkey in my life.

But all in all, my dinner at the bistro was enjoyable, better than any attempt at home cooking simply because I ate something by a professional chef, so artistry was expected. I left with my stomach full, went back to my parents’ house, and went to bed. The weather was very cold, but it was clear outside without any harsh winds. I was able to have a good night’s sleep.

Non-fiction

Thanksgiving Dinner

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It’s that day when I sit around and do nothing except feast on carbs and watch football. The league has pitted teams I don’t care about. It seems like they do every year. This time around, it’s two teams with a losing record who suck. But because they’re teams in large markets, the league expects the largest audience to watch. Maybe they’re right, but it doesn’t make for watchable football. They should’ve known these teams would be bad before the season started.

Anyway, my parents understand I don’t like turkey because it’s bland. I’ve never liked turkey since I was a boy. The only time I might enjoy it is for leftovers when I can make a sandwich. My mother, who would keep pounds of turkey meat after Thanksgiving dinner, would have a dozen or so everything bagels to make turkey sandwiches. I used to eat them with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and mayonnaise, enough ingredients to mask the turkey. I would stick a sliver of meat into the sandwiches enough to make it non-vegetarian. But we won’t this year because we’re going out to eat at a restaurant that’ll serve a three-course meal, and it’ll offer several other options than turkey. Whatever I order will taste better.

I have different taste buds from my parents. When it comes to pizza, consider me a snob. I used to live in LA, where several pseudo-New York-style pizzerias coexisted. In case you don’t know already, New York style is thin crust, and they tend to burn the mozzarella enough to form brown spots all over it. My parents aren’t too familiar. They’ve lived in the suburbs for most of their adult lives. New York style is naturally more urban. I can tell when I drive through the suburbs where I live. Mostly corporate pizza chains are the options around here. Some such places try to mimic the style but don’t come close.

My parents wanted to order pizza a few months ago on Sunday when we watched football. There aren’t many places around here for quality pizza unless there’s a mom-and-pop that I don’t know about. I suggested my favorite corporate pizza chain.

My dad went to order from his iPad and struggled with the website. It took him close to a half hour to get to the order page. We had to help him out.

“Seventy dollars for two pizzas?” he said. “Are you kidding me?”

That was after all the delivery fees.

“No way,” he said. “We’re ordering from somewhere else.”

“Where?” I said.

“From our regular place. I’ll pick it up.”

Their regular place was a grocery store, not just any grocery store, but one that offered food at a cheaper price. I was skeptical but more peeved that they wanted to order from a place that wasn’t known for its pizza, let alone a grocery store. My pizza snobbery made me throw a fit, but I stayed polite and kept it internal. They ordered from there, and my dad went to pick it up.

He returned with a pizza without any pizza sauce but a garlic ranch sauce. The pizza wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. I was on the fence about it and still wished we would’ve ordered from the corporate pizza chain. As corporate as it was, it still would’ve tasted better than the pizza from the grocery store. I don’t trust grocery stores when it comes to a deli or pizza in this case. But they continue to order from there and say it’s their favorite pizza. I just don’t understand.

But I gotta hand it to them. They reserved a table at a nice restaurant tonight. I’m sure it’ll be better than plain old turkey in which I would’ve smothered in gravy. It used to be all about everything but the turkey on Thanksgiving–the yams, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie. I used to sit with my extended family, and we would play Trivial Pursuit later after we’d stuffed ourselves with tryptophan and pull our names out of a hat to see who would buy whom a Christmas present on a fifty-dollar budget. Those days are gone. My parents live hundreds of miles from the rest of that side of the family. Thanksgiving dinner isn’t the same with only three people, so we might as well go out to eat.

Non-fiction

Another Social Media Rant

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I sat in the ER from two in the afternoon to eight at night and scrolled through social media, bored. My phone’s battery level went from 100% to 30% from the scrolling. I came across a video someone had shot of a young woman, about twenty-four, who melted down after she’d hit a woman’s car. The older woman caught the young woman on video having a meltdown because the young woman didn’t have the money to pay for her insurance and pleaded to let her go. She bawled petulantly and called the older woman heartless for the want to exchange insurance and yelled “F— you” to her. It was so dramatic that it felt like an act. The older woman shot the video on her phone and posted it on social media for the world to see. I went directly to the comments to read what abuse these people had written. They humiliated the young woman and ruined her image.

Let’s do away with camera phones, shall we? Let’s return to the early 2000s and flip phones. Too many people abuse camera phones.

Furthermore, one person after the next turned this into a rant about modern therapists and how young people go to therapy and are taught that everyone except them is the problem. Many people who’d posted gave the old pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps comments and how young people these days are soft. These people must lack empathy. Of course, they don’t have these problems, not that they don’t take the unhealthy route and bully others on social media all day. Nah, that’s not a mental problem, right? They know better, and yada yada yada.

And what wouldn’t be a social media post without people in the comments who turn this viral video into politics? Now, all of a sudden, the young woman who bawled in the video was a woke snowflake.

No matter where I turn, whether it be sports or a video of a Redwood Forest grizzly bear eating honey, people have to bring up WOKE or MAGA and this side versus that side, us versus them. I’m a peace frog. I want everyone to have a restful night. Why do so many people have to be warmongers? Why are people so obsessed with politics? It exhausts me, yet I’m addicted as if I’ll miss the next offensive comment if I stop scrolling.

Let me remind you of something I wrote about these social media sites. I believe they were geared towards teenagers to meet and hook up when they were first introduced. Adults and businesses took over to market themselves. Now, unstable people log in and attack others all day with no consequences. If I had it my way, I would force each user to have to provide a personal photo and their government name to see who would dare post such hateful comments. I’ll bet the problem would clear up like a zit.

But these platforms continue to thrive and allow users to post under aliases. The users don’t have to present any photos of their faces and can remain anonymous like rooftop snipers, so they can get away with racial slurs, among other forms of the slippery slope of hate speech. To me, it’s no longer freedom of speech.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to the young woman who was exposed on video after she’d hit the woman’s car. My gut tells me she didn’t have a peaceful day when the video was leaked. But that’s the world I live in. It has always been a savage land. Only now, we’ve abused power with camera phones. These cameras are privileges that must be taken away if used against others. We’re not animals. So why do we shoot others on video as if they are?

Anyway, enough about that. I left with my parents around 8:30 last night and went to Yardhouse, hungry as hell. I should’ve ordered the grilled cheese with tomato bisque which I’ve always eaten there. But instead I ordered the cheesesteak sandwich because of my mood, and because the picture tantalized me. As it turned out, I left Yardhouse full of regret. Let this be a lesson to us all. If you go to your favorite restaurant, always go with your favorite, no matter what your taste buds tell you. Sometimes they deceive you, and the picture tastes better than the actual food. You know, after you eat the cheesesteak sandwich, the grilled cheese would’ve tasted better. Now you feel you wasted dinner on something that didn’t taste as good as your go-to item.

Non-fiction

A Moveable Page

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I’ve followed my vast reading list and have forgotten how many years it has been–maybe two–since I’ve begun. Most of the novels have been hard to read because they were written at a time when the language was different, or they were translated from French or Russian or some other language.

I’ve made it to the writers with the last name that starts with H. One of those writers is Hemingway. I’ve read all of his novels, but I chose not to skip him for Henry James and opened A Moveable Feast for the first time since I was in my twenties. Some of the chapters came back to me, like the chapter when he visited a bookstore in France. It’s another novel that takes place in France. What is it about that country? I’ve never been there, but I plan to go before I die. He borrowed a bunch of books from the lady who owned the store, and he was in debt to her. She told him not to worry, to pay her when the time was right. I also remember the scenes with Gertrude Stein and a little about F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is the novel where Hemingway wrote his famous line about writing one true sentence. He also wrote that he would stop while he was ahead in the morning and never think about the story until the next day so his subconscious could figure it out. It sounded like a lot of superstition.

After reading many different writers and their styles, I wondered what made Hemingway influential. He would write a sentence such as “The wine was great.” Well, what was great about it? He would never expound.

I read too many books on writing in my years as an insecure writer. Most of those how-to books would point out how Hemingway’s sentence wouldn’t work, and I understood.

I’m in the middle of the book, and page after page, Hemingway mentions how something is beautiful or wonderful. Again, I wondered what was beautiful or wonderful about a person, place, or thing, just as if someone were to tell me.

In my twenties, a friend loaned me Stephen King’s On Writing.

“You gotta read this book if you’re a serious writer,” he said.

He got me excited, so I went home and read it.

In one chapter, King delved into a writer’s mechanics, namely grammar and style. I immersed myself in that chapter as if King would reveal a holy secret. He advised writers to write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs. The idea was new to me in the years I began to write stories. Pens explode. Jars salivate.

The same friend, a King fanatic, lent me another book. I think it was The Stand, a novel that was over a thousand pages. It intimidated me. How could I finish a book that long? How would it hold my attention? The paragraphs were littered with adjectives and adverbs. I had to put the book down and shoot it in the barn. Maybe he’d written The Stand and realized his errors before writing On Writing. Suppose he’d removed those adjectives and adverbs. The novel would’ve been fewer than five hundred pages, and maybe I would’ve finished the book. Even without them, his prose would’ve still been too golly-gee-whiz for me. I’ve noticed many of his stories took place in Maine, where I think he’s from. Is that how people act up there? I don’t know. All I knew was King wasn’t for me.

We need adjectives at times. If there was a hit-and-run, and a cop asked me (no, wait, no, that’s an offense these days), if a policeman asked me (no, that’s an offense, too), if a police officer asked me what the color of the car was, I would need to tell him it was green. But if I said the car was great, he wouldn’t have anything to go by.

But I still enjoy Hemingway’s style for how direct it is. It’s hardly flowery compared to something by Flaubert. I can’t get over how Ernest described certain people in real life, such as how he described Fitzgerald when he met him in a bar, I think, in France. It was somewhat critical. He painted Fitzgerald out to be a pretty weasel. Would that be appropriate these days? Writers used to get away with that degree of criticism, but I don’t know about it now.

Non-fiction

Mother’s Basement

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I read through the post comments on X about the election, and someone insulted someone else by telling him to get out of his mother’s basement, which wasn’t funny. That insult is never funny. What if what he said was true and that the man did live with his mother? And why does the person have to be a man? A woman living in her mother’s basement isn’t considered funny or pathetic, but for a man, it is. Furthermore, what if his mother doesn’t have a basement? Most people probably don’t. But the insulter used a basement for emphasis to paint them as an even bigger loser than someone who lived with his mother but didn’t have one. In other words, he was trapped in a dungeon so to speak.

But suppose it’s there, and he does live with his mother–the insulted I’m talking about–to take care of her. She has a debilitating illness and needs special care. What’s so funny about that? There are dozens of reasons a grown man could be living with her. What if her husband died, and she can’t take care of herself? She’s grieving the loss and living with deep depression as a result.

I’ve been there. Crawling out of depression is hard. I also had to live with my parents for a three-year stint right out of college. No one would hire me. I didn’t have connections, which was the only real way to find a job back then, the way American culture worked, so I moved from Orange County back up north to live with Mom and Dad again at the same house where they’d raised me through high school and some of junior college. The experience was emasculating to say the least. I didn’t feel like an adult any longer or like a “man.” My autonomy was stripped. I had a curfew. They always went to bed early. I had to obey their rules. There were no jobs in that small town either. I had to pick up unsustainably temporary jobs that kept me from leaving my parents’ house.

There were extremely hopeless moments when I thought I would never get out. By the time I was twenty-six, I gambled and saved money with plans to leave their nest again for Los Angeles. The job I had at the time paid me eighty dollars a day. Mind you, the inflation wasn’t as extreme, but still, there was no way I could support myself with such low wages. And this was before taxes. I had just enough drinking money to briefly cure my woes of living with them while they provided housing. Nothing else was affordable.

That summer, I packed up a U-Haul and drove hundreds of miles to North Hollywood to my first apartment since college. The novelty of living free and alone wore off after a few weeks. I had to find a job again to support myself with no connections. Any old job would do. I wanted to become a screenwriter, but I knew I was a long shot. Some people told me to follow my heart, so I did. Other people were detractors who told me what I was doing was foolish, essentially, cliche. Whatever.

I reflect on what I did and think it may have kept me behind, but the past seems meaningless anyway. What mattered then doesn’t matter now. Good thing I took the gamble. Otherwise, I could’ve been still living with them.

Non-fiction

Non-Urgent Care

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I bit my lip when I was eating a pizza slice back in early October. My mouth started bleeding. I tasted blood, and the bite was painful. The pain lasted for a few weeks but went away after a month. The sore didn’t heal. I kept chewing it that whole time out of a nervous, unconscious habit, probably in my sleep, too, when I wasn’t aware of course.

The sore turned white like most mouth sores and blistered up. I looked in the mirror up close at it this week and saw a hole in the middle. It appeared yellow as if it was infected, so I made a mental note to drive to urgent care on Friday.

The drive there was less than a mile from my apartment in the middle of the afternoon. I expected a long wait like every other time at urgent care, but I got there to find myself alone to my surprise. Good. The visit would be quicker than I initially thought. That was the good news.

A nurse opened the door and called my name. I followed him inside with my backpack. He wore navy blue nurse scrubs and a matching face mask when he led me to a patient room.

“You’ll be in room four,” he said.

Oh, room four. I was hoping room three. Oh well.

He let me in and pointed me to a seat, the only seat, in that small exam room as if there were a dozen other seats in there. “You’re going to sit in that seat,” he said.

As opposed to what?

“I’ll take your blood pressure.”

The norm at urgent care. I could’ve gone in with a sprained wrist, and they still would’ve taken my blood pressure.

He stuck a little plastic clamp on my left forefinger and wrapped a velcro sleeve around my left arm before pressing buttons on the blood pressure machine. “So why are you here?” he asked.

I was embarrassed to tell him at a place called urgent care that I was there because of a mouth sore, not like my ears were bleeding.

He typed my answer into a desktop computer across that little room. “What medications are you currently taking?”

I told him which ones, although I struggled to remember all of them since I took a lot.

“What’s your pharmacy?” he asked.

I told him that as well, but he had trouble finding it in his search base at first. “The doctor will be in shortly,” he said. “Stay there.”

Like I was going anywhere.

I expected to sit there and worry for another half hour. But the door opened not five minutes later. Thank God. The bad news was when the doctor stepped in. He was another man in scrubs, my doctor for the day, looking to be in his early thirties. Whatever happened to old doctors like when I was young? All doctors used to wear a white coat and have silver hair with a stethoscope around their necks after so many decades in their fields. This guy looked like a personal trainer who’d snuck into urgent care after spotting someone doing squats at the local gym. All that was missing was a red clown nose and a rubber chicken in his pocket. But his face was gravely serious.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. Didn’t he look at my chart?

“I have a mouth sore that hasn’t gone away.”

He got up close to me. “Let me see,” he said.

I pulled my lower lip down to show him.

He examined it for fewer than five seconds and sat in a chair across the room from me. My hope was waning. He looked at me contemptuously. “How long has it been there?” he asked.

“I lost count of the weeks,” I said. “I bit it like in early October. And I keep biting it because of my anxiety.”

“Well, stop biting it,” he said.

“Okay?”

“It’s not going to heal if you keep biting it.”

Thanks, Doc, for your expertise analysis.

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked.

“Try mouthwash or Chlorhexidine your dentist prescribed, or gargle salt and warm water.”

That was all he told me. He wouldn’t write me up for an antibiotic or anything.

“That’s it?” I said. “What if it’s infected?”

He stood up and got close to me again. “Let me see again?”

Wasn’t the first three-second observation enough? I pulled my lower lip down once more, and he observed closer before he sat back in the chair. “You got to let it heal.”

My hope dropped like a dead pigeon. “What about a biopsy?” I said.

“Wait two or three weeks, and if it doesn’t go away, see an ear, nose, and throat specialist or your dentist.”

An ear, nose, and throat specialist? Where did my mouth figure into that equation?

He opened the door to let me out, and that was that.

I left urgent care without anything accomplished. At least the visit was less than an hour, the only positive takeaway.

Let me reiterate how disappointed I am with the modern medical world, which used to be more caring, more professional. Somewhere along the line, the patients started arriving on conveyor belts, and doctors started ringing them up like Ralph’s cashiers. Now one of the Kennedys might be in charge. I still wasn’t sure if that man was even a doctor.

Speaking of Ralph’s, I drove there and bought Morton’s Natural Sea Salt to take with warm water as directed. Nothing else has helped. I guess I’ll try not to bite my lip to avoid seeing my awful dentist again in hopes this sore will heal up. An urgent care bill will probably appear in my mailbox, charging me eight hundred dollars like the one back in August when I couldn’t feel my hand. The ER doctor didn’t do so much as even touch me, let alone use a machine on me.

Non-fiction

Oreo Coke Zero

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I went to Circle K last night to pick up some candy, and my eyes came across bottles of Oreo-flavored Coke Zero. Who the hell thought of that idea? I bet a marketing rep was eating out of an Oreo container one night and drinking Coke Zero to reduce sugar when the thought came to him. He’d been drinking Coke Zero and eating Oreos together for a long time and feeling pressure to come up with something new to present to the Ops Director. You know what? I love this combination so much, more so than Oreos and Vitamin D milk. I’m going to pitch this to the Ops Director. Somehow the Ops Director said yes.

I’ve seen some weird soft drink concoctions, but nothing like this. It’s sad when someone eats a whole Oreo container, that big container wrapped in film around the tray, as sad as someone eating a whole pizza by himself. We’ve all done that, we’re embarrassed to admit.

Now as an adult, I’m not the soft drink aficionado I used to be. Give me a regular Coca-Cola on occasion. I used to drink anything sugary and carbonated, even those orange soft drinks like Sunkist, but now I find most of them disgusting. Never in my life when I was a kid did I imagine an Oreo-flavored Coca-Cola. But now there are several weird sodas on the market. Not to mention it’s part of the Coke Zero campaign which I don’t recommend to anyone watching their sugar intake. I would steer them towards Perrier any day unless they enjoy Robitussin.

But it appears Coca-Cola has outdone itself. They’ve run out of ideas. Marketing reps need to come up with something or else they’ll have nothing to do. How about Nacho Cheese Doritos flavored Coke? Who hasn’t eaten Doritos with Coca-Cola? We all have. It’s one of the most popular junk food combinations in America. They might as well put out a flavor like that.

Non-fiction

A Trip to the Slaughterhouse

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I expected something bad to happen at my dental appointment for what I thought was a cleaning, but nothing worse than this. The waiting room looked as if the last time it was remodeled was in 1978. I checked in with the girl at the front desk. “My name is Ben. I’m here for my ten o’clock cleaning.”

She said, “Your name is Ben, and you’re here for two fillings.”

“Two fillings?” I said. “No one ever told me about any fillings.”

She never looked up from her computer. “Have a seat,” she said. “And we’ll call you when we’re ready.”

I began to wonder if they thought I was another patient. So I sat in that noisy waiting room, with a TV blaring, where half the people were asleep. A few skeletons sat in their chairs, too.

They called my name only ten minutes later, to my surprise, and an assistant with a mask over his face began bringing me to one of the rooms with a dental chair.

A female assistant came in and said her name while I was lying there like a torture victim. She mumbled her name to where I couldn’t decipher what it was. She sounded half-dead when she asked if I was feeling any pain.

“I have this sore in my mouth that won’t heal,” I said.

She looked away at another room across the room. “I’ll let the dentist know,” she said before she left.

I didn’t feel reassured.

A dentist came in a few minutes later with another dentist (if they were both dentists). The female dentist whom I guessed was the main dentist asked where I was feeling the pain.

I said, “I have a sore in my mouth after biting down on it a month ago.”

She made it sound as if they couldn’t operate and I would have to reschedule. I didn’t want to do that, so I said, “I don’t feel any pain unless I bite down on it.”

So the other dentist, whom I guessed was her subordinate, gave me a form to fill out for them to send a prescription to my pharmacy. I began to fill it out before giving it back to her assistant who ended up working on my fillings. He wore a surgical mask, goggles, and a shower cap, along with a bright light shining from his forehead. His whole head was covered. I couldn’t see who he was, and his foreign accent was thick to where I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He kept looking out the room when he was operating on my teeth with his assistant, the woman who didn’t look at me before.

They hovered over me while I had to keep my mouth open. Usually, a filling replacement took twenty minutes to a half hour at most, but this took over an hour for two fillings. And usually, the dentist would tell me I would feel a slight pinch before injecting a needle into my gums. Well, I felt a heavy pinch without a verbal warning several times when he injected the Novacaine. And usually, the dentist would leave the room for about ten minutes for the numbness to take effect before he would start drilling my teeth. But this guy went to drilling right away. I smelled the burn from the drill and the pain of the drilling through my tooth. He stopped and asked if I felt any pain. I did, quite a lot, but I also didn’t want him to inject more Novacaine because I didn’t want my mouth to be numb all day. So I accepted the pain.

“Nuh-uh,” I said.

An hour was no exaggeration. It took even longer than that. He would say, “We’re almost done” every twenty minutes or so. They were still drilling after about an hour. I didn’t believe him by the third time. They made me feel like cattle. Several other patients were being worked on in there, and my dentist kept stopping and looking away into other rooms. The procedure took so long that I was beginning to think they were building a house in my mouth. I was waiting for a contractor to show up in a vest and a flannel, with a tool belt and measuring tape to install a new bathroom.

This was the result of not going to a private practice to have dental work done. This place was something different. It was a dental place alright, where multiple dentists worked, and they were substandard.

I used to have personable dentists. They would come in, shake my hand, tell me their names, ask me what my favorite football team was, and get me in and out of there in less than an hour. But it wasn’t the case there. The dentist never even told me his name.

He with his thick foreign accent kept saying, “Close your lips” instead of asking me to close my mouth when he stuck that suction tube in me.

Close my lips? How could I close my lips? My brain didn’t know what that meant for some reason. His assistant stuck her own suction tube in there and shoved my lower jaw to close my mouth.

It was the worst hell in the dentist’s office. All that was missing was malpractice where if the dentist missed and drilled a gaping hole in my gums where the Novacaine wasn’t.

The healthcare system never was this bad twenty years or so ago. I used to never have trouble picking up prescriptions for instance. But I get phone calls nowadays where they tell me that they’re out of stock and I should try other pharmacies that might have it. I received one prescription just last week but counted the pills later to discover that I was ten pills short of thirty, so I had to call the pharmacy and tell them I was missing some. What if they thought I was lying? I would have to miss ten days. But they believed me, lucky for me.

I also used to see doctors without any scheduling mishaps. A hand surgeon never called me back to schedule an appointment when I couldn’t feel my hand a few months ago, so I never got to see him. This further proved to me that the medical system would forever be fucked.

Non-fiction

Daylight Savings Schmavings

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I like to wake up before the sun rises and sit on the curb when the moon is still out. In the summer, the sun doesn’t rise until I leave the coffee shop in the morning. But now after the clock has turned back an hour, I get out of bed when the sun is already out. It’s too late to light candles in the bathroom when outside is already bright. The sun sets before I get off work and take a walk through downtown. I don’t mind that. Sure, the sun comes out early, but it leaves early too, while in the summer, the sun comes out late and doesn’t leave until eight o’clock at night. It’s safe to say the sun doesn’t appeal to me all that much, especially in the summer when it barks down at me. I appreciate the cold much more than the heat. At least in the cold, I can wear my heavy black North Face jacket to keep warm. My parents bought me that jacket one Christmas. I like it except for its hood. I would’ve rather preferred it without one. But anyway in the dead of summer, nothing can shield me from the furnace outside. I sweat everywhere, even without jogging, something I don’t miss.

Thanksgiving will be here in a few weeks, and jury duty will start around then. I don’t know if I’ll have to report as a juror. If I’m lucky, the judge will dismiss me. The only light shining is that I’ll be excused from work.

They dismissed me three years ago at the municipal court downtown. After driving there for four days and waiting all day in the courthouse, all I could do was sit in the hall and keep waiting until they called my group. When we sat in the courtroom, the judge asked us personal questions to see who was fit to be a juror and who wasn’t. For some reason, I didn’t pass the audition. Maybe because I said yes when they asked me if I ever knew someone who committed a crime. They let me go on a Thursday. I believe they’ll dismiss me this time as well.

My cousin invited me to Thanksgiving up north yesterday, but I told her that I might have to sit in court that week. She also invited me to Christmas. Our family gets together once a year to celebrate the holidays. It’s usually alright. The family tradition used to be a gift exchange. After Thanksgiving dinner, every family member would pull a name out of a hat and have to buy that person a Christmas gift on a fifty-dollar budget. Now I’m older, and I don’t care as much about gifts anymore. Just give me cash. Fifty dollars will suffice. I don’t prefer gift cards, which I usually get. The family knows I like Starbucks, so every other year, an aunt, a cousin, or an uncle would buy me a fifty-dollar gift card there. But it never excited me. Although I drink at Starbucks every day, it’s never thrilling to have a gift card. What’s the purpose of a gift card anyway? It’s just free cash to spend somewhere specific. I would rather feel free to spend the money anywhere. I guess Amazon is the only gift card I can see being useful. But even then, cash is still cash. If someone gives me fifty dollars, I’ll spend it wherever I like. But again, I don’t care. Don’t buy me anything.

Winter is coming. The animals are beginning to hibernate. A roadrunner crossed me on the sidewalk yesterday when I went for a walk. But the crows have flown somewhere supposedly warmer. But where would that be? Not that I’m counting, but I haven’t seen a crow for weeks. I’m never thrilled to see a crow, but a roadrunner is different. Birds that can’t fly fascinate me, like penguins. Picture a penguin with its fat belly or a roadrunner with its long tail flying through the air. What a funny sight, like a penguin wearing sunglasses. My friend once wrote a children’s book about a penguin that flew a plane. His friend, an artist, illustrated each page and published it so long ago that I forgot its title. He moved away back east, and I used to see him maybe once every ten years.

All my past friends have moved somewhere far from California, and I have nothing but memories. Last night, I thought about the time when my friend came to my apartment to go barhopping and noticed a supplement on top of my dishwasher called X-plode. He began exploding in laughter at me because of its name, X-plode, meaning I would shred so much that my muscles would erupt.

When we saw our other friend upstairs, on the third floor, my friend Ray said, “Brandon, Ben is taking steroids.”

Brandon looked at me disapprovingly. “Is that true, Ben?”

“It’s not steroids,” I said. “It’s a supplement.”

“Yeah, right,” Brandon said.

I was all into weight training in my late thirties, so I asked Ray, “Hey, Ray? Are you looking for peak performance?”

He started laughing again, and so did Brandon.

I asked, “Ray? Do you want to achieve mass or endurance? Are you ready to give 110%?”

The laughter continued.

I quit taking X-plode before the container was empty because my heart was ready to explode out of my chest. It tasted like pink lemonade if pink lemonade tasted any differently from yellow lemonade. I wouldn’t be able to discern the two if ever there was a taste test. All I knew was that X-plode really worked.

Non-fiction

A Distant Halloween

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I hadn’t gone to a Halloween party since my late twenties in Larchmont, a somewhat suburb near Koreatown in Los Angeles. It was a house party circa 2005. I was twenty-eight and dressed as a banana with white Mickey Mouse gloves. It was a full banana suit. I got drunk off whiskey and beer in a hipster house.

Most of them were too cool to dress as anything except as hipsters, which was a costume in and of itself. They wore all different ironic articles such as vests, trucker hats, and ironic message T-shirts. Even their mustaches and the Pabst Blue Ribbon cans in their hands screamed hipster. Many were artists, like musicians, designers in the movie/music industry, and plain old art school graduates.

And there I was, a professional delivery driver who told people he was a writer, sticking out like a sore thumb in a banana costume. Only my thumbs were covered with the Mickey Mouse gloves. I felt foolish, naturally, being one of the only people dressed as something. Not that I wanted to be the only schmuck at the party in a costume, but I knew it was a risk going to a hipster Halloween party anyway. A few who didn’t come there dressed as hipsters donned their unimaginative costumes, such as those of cowboys, pirates, or gladiators. Boring.

I spent over fifty dollars for that special-ordered banana costume in the mail. UPS delivered it to my Hollywood apartment. It wasn’t even sold at a Halloween store, but my vision saw a banana. My mission was to breathe life into the party, to loosen up the stiff hipster crowd, to impress the ladies. Who could compete with a costume like that? No one, as far as I was concerned.

The ladies were dressed as either hipsters themselves or as witches or devils or angels. We took a group picture at the party like it was for a baseball team, and I took my middle stance as the banana, the top banana. All that hipster alcohol made me pass out there at some point.

When I woke up the next morning still in the costume, my head ached, partly from a nasty hangover and partly because the costume made me sleep awkwardly. The banana nub on my head strained my neck. The host had no aspirin to alleviate the headache, but she adored me because of my outfit. I was flattered by that cute blonde professional singer.

It was my best Halloween costume ever, better than the hospital gown I wore about five years prior at a party up north, hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. My friend and I showed up in the cold weather to another house party. I wore just the hospital gown with a fake rubber ass sticking out the back. My friend came dressed as his usual asshole self. When I walked through the party with that big ass, people, mostly women, fondled those bouncy buttocks. They were there for the grabbing. I got even more drunk at that party. In my early twenties, what else was I supposed to do to ease my social anxieties? It was a pool party. I took a tequila shot from an ice sculpture and met a red devil woman with horns on her head. We made out on the diving board before I got too sick from drinking all that tequila. My world started spinning. I had to get up and leave her for the bathroom, but I couldn’t find it in that house of mirrors. Every door was tried until I finally barfed in the toilet before passing out in one of the bedrooms.

My friend found me sleeping on the bed and dragged me out of the house when I was still in the hospital gown. It was like he was stealing me from the hospital. That might’ve been the most memorable Halloween of my life, more so than when I was a kid, just tricking or treating for candy, going door to door like a salesman.

There were no great Halloween stories to tell from my childhood days. All I did was eat into a sugar high from mostly Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a few candy corns here and Twix bars there, and sometimes a freaking apple, which parents should’ve been ashamed of distributing into kids’ bags. I had strong feelings about candy and what people gave me from their houses when I went trick-or-treating. My last year was when I was ten. I didn’t partake in trick-or-treating any time after that. If I did, it would’ve only added another layer to my everlasting arrested development.