Non-fiction

Insomnia Pt. 386

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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.

Non-fiction

The Cold

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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.

Non-fiction

An Average Sunday

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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.

Non-fiction

Delivery Chronicles

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All I think about is work, which must make me a workaholic. I used to have an imagination doing deliveries. Those times were traumatic. I wasn’t making much money (not that I am now either), and I drove all day and night through Los Angeles, with a two-hour break in between, which in some years I devoted to meditation and writing. Sometimes the dispatchers would send me downtown to pick up nine-hundred-dollar food deliveries and deliver them to one of the companies in the skyscrapers. I get a panic attack just remembering. If you’ve ever been to downtown Los Angeles, you would recall the one-way streets of Figueroa, Hope, and Grand, and how, if you missed the address, you would have to start all over again.

I went through panic attacks on the road.

One time, I’d come home at around 9:30 p.m. from another shift and smoked a bowl of potent weed and took a shot of whiskey when I was smoking every day. My dispatcher, who was also my boss, sent an order to my phone for a sushi restaurant. The order was huge, and the tip was over fifty dollars, and I was already high, so I panicked. I couldn’t tell him I couldn’t drive there. It was the end of the shift, and the other drivers had gone home. I could’ve gotten in trouble if I rejected the order, and I couldn’t tell him I was stoned, so I decided to drive to the sushi restaurant. A cop could’ve pulled me over and tested me for drugs. Now that they can do that somehow, I would’ve been fucked.

I made it there okay and entered the restaurant high as hell. My eyes must’ve looked like two fireball candies. I was paranoid. It felt as if the customers were looking at me. I was so high, and I had to stand in there and wait for them to make the sushi rolls, and the restaurant was filled to capacity on a Friday night. Did I mention it was raining? There was nowhere to sit and try to relax, so I stood near the sushi bar for about twenty minutes and waited for them to finish the job. When they did, I grabbed the sushi bags and got the hell out of there. (Actually, I used bags of my own. The restaurant owners were too cheap to afford plastic bags. Anyway, I bagged everything and left.)

It was a dangerous trip up Laurel Canyon to a house in the hills on a stormy night, where the road curved like a sidewinder, and I had to be careful turning and looking out for cars speeding down the opposite lane to my left with their bright white headlights making me temporarily blind. Somehow I dropped the food off safely to the customer who’d ordered sushi that late at night and drove back down the winding road.

I forgot how I got home, which usually happened when I was high. I was the character from the movie Memento who forgot everything with no short-term memory, so he had to write everything he’d experienced to recall what happened. That was me on weed. I don’t smoke it now, but my memory is evasive. I forget a thought from a minute or so ago, so I sit and try to recollect it. Some of them are important, so I should probably write them down as well, but I never carry a notepad, and my phone is too complicated to sort through. By the time I get to the note app, I forget what notes I was supposed to take.

So that was one story of when I was doing deliveries in Los Angeles. I’ll write a book someday on my experiences doing that job, just not now. I’m not ready. I’m working on other stuff. Sometime in the future, like with my month in rehab and the hospital in Pasadena, I’ll get to it. Unlike those nightmares I lived through as a delivery driver, I took notes at rehab every day and kept them in my closet somewhere, and I’ll take them out in a few years.

Non-fiction

On Friday the Thirteenth

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I had the chance yesterday to write about the celebrated movie franchise Friday the 13th, but it slipped my mind. This blog isn’t all about inner turmoil. Sometimes it’s about praise, and I give it to Jason Vorhees and some of the greatest slasher films ever made. Who could deny their resonance?

I discovered the third film on HBO, the first of the series I saw in the eighties when Jason Vorhees chased a bunch of teenagers through the woods in Crystal Lake. He ran after a pretty girl with his machete, I believe, and her boyfriend jumped in his way. Jason squeezed his head until his eyeballs popped out. At that point, I was hooked at about eight years old. It probably scarred me for life, and now I’m suffering from childhood trauma, but I can’t deny the impact it has left on me.

Don’t get me wrong. If I’m channel surfing and one of the movies is playing, I’ll most likely skip over it now that I’m older. But I must admit its power over me when I was young. HBO used to show all the sequels. I loved seeing Jason wearing his hockey mask. But before he wore it, he covered his face with what looked like a potato sack in the first two films. He looked ridiculous. By the third film, he found a hockey mask. Don’t ask me where one be lying in Crystal Lake. Maybe there was a hockey rink nearby that I didn’t know of, and a hockey team played there like the Crystal Lake Beavers or something. Nevertheless, he took it and ditched the potato sack to murder teenagers, camp counselors, and drifters.

The fourth film starred the renowned Corey Feldman of Goonies fame. Why he chose to act in it is anyone’s guess. I don’t remember Jack shit from the film except Jason drowning from being chained to a motorboat, I think. Don’t take my word for it because, like I said, the childhood trauma from watching those films has made me repress memories.

This led to the fifth film where not even Jason Vorhees was the killer. A paramedic was. It’s a mystery why the auteur of that specific sequel made that decision. But Part Five had some of the greatest kills. I judge Friday the 13th movies by that. And who could argue against Jason cutting someone’s eyes out with a weed whacker and popping a guy’s skull against a tree with a belt?

In the sixth film, Jason comes back to life somehow after drowning in the lake in the fourth film. The writers must’ve run out of ideas by then to make him supernatural after however many times Jason was resurrected in the lake. The only scene I think I remember from that film was a dude who got stabbed to death in a Port-a-Potty. What a disgraceful way to go.

And then things got really ridiculous in the seventh installment, when Jason went head-to-head against a teenage girl with telekinetic powers. Her mind could hurl objects at someone. Somehow she murdered Jason in the end with her ability.

I stopped watching those sequels by the eighth one. I think it was Jason Takes Manhattan. Oh boy. How did Jason get there? I think Crystal Lake might be somewhere in New Jersey if I’m not mistaken. West Virginia would make more sense. Either way, Jason had to have traveled to Manhattan through some form of transportation other than by foot, which would’ve been a long journey. I can’t imagine him standing on the side of the highway, jutting his thumb out for a ride as a hitchhiker. And I certainly wouldn’t imagine a driver picking him up when he sees the hockey mask and the machete. Jason could’ve also taken the bus with many other passengers. It would be the same situation. What bus driver would allow Mr. Vorhees onboard? And where would Jason find the coins to insert into the coin machine at the front of said bus? Who would sit next to him?

The ninth sequel was called Jason Goes to Hell, which sounds even more absurd than him going to Manhattan because now Jason, I assume, faces off with Satan. My money is on Satan. Maybe someday I’ll follow my curiosity if it’s burning enough.

And finally, the tenth film is Jason X, the worst of all. I caught glimpses of that film as I was surfing by. And yes, Jason was on a spaceship. Don’t ask me how. He snuck onboard and cut a guy’s body in half. That was all I saw.

So those are the Friday the 13th movies. I believe I’ve described enough. But as a bonus, I must bring up the movie Freddy Vs. Jason, where Mr. Vorhees challenges the horror movie icon Freddy Krueger. For those readers who are unfamiliar with him, Freddy was burned alive on Elm Street in some unknown town and came back to life in teenagers’ dreams. Don’t ask why teenagers are so targeted for murder. They’re the prey in most horror films. Anyway, Jason and Freddy square off, which means Jason has to go to sleep, right? I don’t know about you, but I can’t picture Jason counting sheep. What does he do? Does he retire for the day after slashing a bunch of horny teenagers and lie back on his cot near the lake with his mask still on? “Yep yep, another long day of decapitations, and I’m bushed. Time to get some shut-eye.” We must all just assume Jason is awake around the clock. I do.

But those are my opinions on this movie franchise. Friday the thirteenth comes around rarely like an eclipse. When it’s here, I gotta mention some of the greatest films of my youth.

Non-fiction

Untied

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I feel better on this Friday morning after surviving another painful week. This felt like a long one, full of stress and anxiety. My medical bill showed up in my inbox last night, and I wasn’t prepared for the cost. For the first time, a hospital had sent it to my email. I opened it to read VIEW MY BILL, and after I clicked on the link, my vision blurred when I saw the total. Over eight hundred dollars for my visit. The actual total was over fourteen hundred dollars, but my pathetic insurance covered only five hundred something after I’d waited to see a doctor for over two hours on a Monday night in a crowded room with a numb left hand. The doctor didn’t even touch me. Shouldn’t she have at least felt my hand for that much money? The nurses didn’t hook me up to anything. They didn’t use any equipment. She just diagnosed me as having ulnar nerve entrapment and referred me to a specialist who never called me back after a month.

The medical world today is broken. Doctors must be greedy. How else can I explain the cost of seeing one? This doesn’t include my trip to urgent care, where the doctor at least held my hand and asked if I felt anything.

I told him, “Yes, a little.”

“This could be a mini stroke,” he said. “I suggest you go to the hospital and get x-rays.”

…Only for the doctor at the hospital to roll her eyes and say he was wrong. Don’t I get a discount of some sort? And what does my insurance think to where they decide to cover only five hundred dollars of the bill?

I don’t have it as bad as my father. He broke his tooth from chewing on peanuts. Now he has been missing one since last November. He went to the dentist the same week, and the dentist told him he would have to wait for a new one. Where’s the tooth coming from? Singapore? Do they have to ship the new tooth by FedEx?

It’s now September of the next year, and the tooth still hasn’t arrived. The dentist will call him when he’s ready to apply it, and my father will have to pay over ten thousand dollars: the price of a used car. To believe he has gone this long without a tooth is nearly impossible. I would think it’s a medical emergency to miss one because people have to chew their food. And I could only imagine the pain my father was suffering after the tooth fell out. But he seems to be doing fine now without it.

Anyway, like I said, we have to value our health first and foremost, which is why it’s the most expensive cost of all. We work just to pay our medical bills, at least for me who doesn’t make enough already. I’ll have to pay for the bill with my credit card and fall deeper into debt after paying a speeding ticket which I’ll take blame for. My credit card was in such good shape a few months ago. Maybe I should’ve never taken myself to urgent care and left my hand alone. Thank God I can feel it again, and maybe it’s a blessing that the hand specialist will never call me.

Non-fiction

A Dream Job

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I went for a walk and kept my head down to stare at my phone like a lot of people do these days. Google likes to follow my habits. It knows which websites I’ve visited. So the app sends me suggestions on what to read. Well, I found an article from a business journal about someone who’d applied for over twenty-two hundred jobs in the United States. He still hadn’t landed one. Wow. In the teaser, you could call it, it said the person was thinking about giving up the search. How depressing. What a hopeless feeling it brings. The teaser went on to describe the man as having served in the Navy with a handful of tech jobs he’d included on his resume. I scrolled down the page with my thumb to read the article, and as soon as I did, a pop-up appeared with subscription options. So if I wanted to read further, I would have to agree to be swamped by emails every day by this journal. No thanks. I get enough junk as it is. So much for reading it.

But what I read had bothered me for the rest of the night. Over twenty-two hundred jobs. Think about that. If he were to apply for one job a day, the search would’ve gone on for over six years. And maybe that was how long it had taken him so far. I might give up too.

So who’s to blame for a person as qualified as him to be unemployed? He could be overqualified for many jobs. After reading briefly about his experience, it was enough to know about him that he was surely competent. What hope does it give those of us who don’t have his qualifications? I’ve been applying here and there once a week for close to five months, and no one has considered me for an interview. It doesn’t help that I don’t know what I want to do for a regular jobby job. You know. Something I don’t want to do but have to do because it’s sustainable, and the company offers benefits as opposed to something I want to do which has no safety net. I’m walking along a razor, fighting against globalization, artificial intelligence, lack of skills, specialized jobs, recession, staff reductions, increased expectations from companies, and geography. All of this leads to burnout, or how I felt after what I saw in that article. I’m better off ignorant.

Non-fiction

Thumbs

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I type on this WordPress page and the letters are like insects. I squint my eyes to see them. It differs from Microsoft Word, where they soar on the page. Where’s the naturalness of writing here? Sometimes I ask the AI assistant what it thinks of my post, and it tells me to write advice on how to cope with a malady such as stress or anxiety or depression, as if I’m a self-help columnist, which I’m not. And I love it when it says the work needs cohesion and focus. Whatever. Who has time? I can bet after I finish this, the same will happen. AI lacks the brains to realize I have ADHD and some things I can’t do, even on Adderall. It also tells me to write a conclusion to these posts, but I suck at that. I never have a conclusion. I just write until the shit ends.

There’s no time. I missed the debate between Trump and Harris, but I thought I heard there wouldn’t be a moderator. I saw a picture of them going to shake hands, which surprised me. I didn’t think they would dare touch each other because of how much hatred there is. Maybe not as much. I also heard they would mute their mics when the other person debated. I can’t believe in a matter of months one of them will become president. And then what? What does either of them stand for? Just as long as they don’t screw this country up, and both of them could do that.

What happened to presidents? They’ve all had their flaws, although I wasn’t living to experience Roosevelt. He was the first president to appear on television at the World’s Fair, but his “Fireside Chats” were on radio. How did the American public perceive him when he was on just that medium? Imagine if these nominees didn’t have a television or social media to communicate through. Would people hate them as much? Or have those mediums made people dislike them even more than if they were just on the radio?

My father told me he used to listen to the Dodgers on the radio when he was a boy in the 1950s, and it was like listening to a bedtime story versus their appearance on television. You may liken it to Roosevelt’s voice as opposed to the sight of him, or it couldn’t have made much of a difference at all. Television does influence people in its own way, and not for the better. Don’t get me started with social media, which should die, period. It looks like it’s here to stay. I can’t think of another medium that’ll take over. Then again, I never foresaw the birth of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. It worries me what will come next

Non-fiction

What the Hell?

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I got up around five in the morning. My alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. It was a spooky jingle, although it wasn’t intended to be. But any jingle at that hour would sound that way. It would’ve been preferable to sleep in, but that isn’t my wiring. I’ve been a light sleeper for as long as I’ve known myself.

I take showers with a candle lit in my bathroom, but my lighter ran out of fluid, so there was no candle this morning before the sun came out. I had to take a shower in almost total darkness.

I sat outside on the curb after my shower. It was still dark. I wore my headphones and listened to my music. I forgot what songs were playing. My music is usually on shuffle, which doesn’t always work. I’ve noticed on any day the app likes to play different songs from the same artist close together. For instance, if a Soundgarden song comes on, another Soundgarden song will come on about three songs later. The same will happen for any other artist. It doesn’t bother me too much. Just makes me wonder why it’s called shuffle if it has a pattern.

Anyway, when I was sitting on the curb, my iPhone rang. It scared me. Who the hell would be calling me at 5:30 in the morning? The call was from Seattle. They’d called twice. The first call had gone straight to my voicemail, but they called again. This time, it rang. I waited for the ringing to end and to hear a voicemail. I was afraid to find out who it was. It was nineteen seconds long. I couldn’t make out where a lady with a thick accent was calling from. Her voice was muffled. Somehow I could hear what she’d said about my email. So whoever it was had sent me an email about my delivery. But what delivery so early in the morning? Who the hell would deliver a package at that time? I checked my email but didn’t find anything. But I checked my other email and saw it was from Amazon. The courier couldn’t get inside my building. The funny thing was I sat in front of my apartment and never noticed one of those large, awkward Amazon vans. I guess you could call them vans. I’m not sure what type of vehicle it is. But that’s not important. What is important is why Amazon would choose to have their couriers deliver any package so early, especially my colon cleansing pills. Don’t get me wrong. I need them, but not that badly. I still have a few pills left to take before the new bottle arrives. I’m not sure what I would do without them to keep things going. The email said, SORRY WE MISSED YOU. WE WILL TRY ANOTHER TIME. Let them try. Like I said, I wasn’t that desperate.

So I walked on to the coffee shop and made it there about ten minutes later. I grabbed my coffee and eggs and wrote longhand for almost a half hour. Now I sit on the patio during sunrise and write this blog thing. My browser said I have six compromised passwords from a data breach from five months ago. Shit. Now I have to change a bunch of passwords. Lucky me. I don’t know how long that message had been there. Those hackers have a full-time job hacking people’s accounts. I can’t keep up with them. There was a data breach last week involving my social, but I learned almost everyone’s social was exposed in the breach. What am I going to do?

Non-fiction

Humdrum

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The sun is at the center of rising in front of the patio. I sit ahead of a man who keeps coughing. It’s yet another Monday with four more days to go. I haven’t eaten so much as yesterday. It was a lazy weekend full of TV and junk food, which is how weekends will be throughout the next season and the season after. I’ll have to adjust.

I paid my speeding ticket and have to take traffic school to avoid points on my record, so my insurance won’t blast me. It’s eighty-five degrees already, and it’s still dark. The heat will only get worse. When will it start getting cool? There was an excessive heat warning yesterday when I was watching football, with a warning of a thunderstorm and flash flood. So I wonder which one it is. It can’t be both. It wouldn’t have made sense.

Anyway, I miss the days of yore, when this coffee shop didn’t have strict rules, when there was plenty of seating. Times have changed for the worse.

The shithead manager works this morning. He served me eggs without sriracha.

So I asked him, “Excuse me. Can I get some sriracha?”

“You know you can order it through the mobile app.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Oh, I must not have seen it.”

Yeah. Suck it, douche bag.

Not only have they taken away the tables, but they’ve also taken away the black forks and replaced them with cheaper white forks. The one I was using cracked in half when I cut my eggs. This company is sliding downhill. Whoever the CEO is is fucking things up and making it another fast food enterprise instead of something greater. More sooner than later, they won’t allow me to hang out and use WiFI. It’ll just be another service industry business working through mobile ordering like a pizza delivery company, where I order something, pick it up, and take the food with me out of there. I used to be able to do anything within the walls of the law, but those days have been long gone for well over a decade.

It makes me frustrated enough to chew on a canker sore in my mouth. It happened last week when I bit down on my lip when I was chewing on a taco. Now it won’t heal and go away. It’s something of a problem. Otherwise, what can I say?

A blind man tries to cross the street with his cane at the intersection. He searches for something, perhaps the button for the crosswalk. He has found it, and now he crosses the street. I’ve wondered about crosswalk buttons and why they exist. Why must a pedestrian have to press one of those things when the crosswalk light should turn on automatically? Does the stoplight have to recognize someone crossing the street? That isn’t the way it should be. The blind man has found a bench to sit on, but he must’ve changed his mind because, again, he’s crossing the street.

I watched football and tennis for most of yesterday. There were surprising upsets and not-so-surprising victories. My parents nodded off in their chairs or on the couch while I watched TV from nine in the morning to nine at night. In the afternoon, I watched Yannik Sinner beat Taylor Fritz in three sets to win the US Open title. It wasn’t much of a match. Sinner showed exactly why he was the number-one ranked player in the world. And then I watched more football while I listened to the Steelers post-game show with my headphones. We ate pizza for lunch, and I ordered tacos and a burrito for dinner at around half past six.

Now today I must work. Bummer. I’m taking a week off at the end of September and can’t wait. One employee on my team has quit his job. He must’ve found another one at another company. Good for him. He got away clean. Or maybe he quit and doesn’t have a job. Either way I envy him. He announced his departure at the last team meeting:

“Friday is my last day, haha.”

And no one acknowledged him and said goodbye. I figure it would’ve been the same reaction to anyone else who announced their resignation from the company, which is how it goes these days. How many others will burn out and quit by October or November? September will run by quickly before I know it. The training wheels are off. And next month will come when I’ll hve to meet quota expectations and turnaround times and all the fun stuff of this job. How will I succeed?

It’s getting hotter out here, and I think I’ll go back inside before I start roasting like a rotisserie chicken rotating under a heat lamp.

A bee keeps harassing me out here. Why do they do that? Am I some sort of bee magnet? Is it the way I smell? The way I dress? Why do I attract bees? I look like a weirdo running around the patio, swatting at this bee chasing me because I don’t want to get stung of course. I’ve never been stung by a bee, lucky for me, but my father has. He went jogging one morning and almost swallowed one. It stung him on the tongue. I’ve been afraid of bees ever since that happened. They’re one of many things I fear.