I awoke to the clock glowing in the guest room of my parents’ house at five in the morning, and it said the same time on my Apple Watch. I just know it’s an Orwellian world when there’s universal time, apparently with all the clocks around me. Those minutes change together between my work laptop and my iPhone for example. That’s a dangerous sign. Who’s controlling it? Who’s syncing the clocks with the same time?

It’s not everywhere though, thank God. For example, the clocks don’t match on the stove and microwave in my apartment. But what if they did? What if my appliances were online with clocks on them? There are stoves and microwaves out there that people can control through an app on their cell phones. They just have to sync them with the universal time. That’s an uncomfortable thought.

What happened to the days when no one had the right time, when a person couldn’t give it to me on the street? He would be a few minutes off. It’s not disturbing like now, such as how Google sends me articles on its news feed based on my interests. Google knows that I’m a football fan and feeds me information about the teams on its app. Google knows more about me than most people do. Even my parents don’t know as much about me as a fucking search engine does. And humans control search engines. God doesn’t. I would feel more comfortable if the holy spirit ran the internet over an evil tech nerd who hides his name.

But anyway, I drove to my parent’s house and saw a walker in their living room next to where my father sat in his leather chair, I thought because of his back pain, but instead he’d been having vertigo for almost a week. That would’ve driven me insane. I couldn’t imagine him living that way. He’d seen multiple doctors and was tested with MRIs and CAT scans. He’d seen neurologists and heart doctors. One of them told him to take vitamins. Another doctor told him to close his eyes and the vertigo would go away, but it didn’t.

What kind of quacks is he seeing? And they’ll bill him thousands of dollars. What a joke. What corruption. Doctors are overpaid to do nothing. My mom thought they didn’t know what they were doing, but I believed they did. They just didn’t want to deal with my father because his medical problems were too complicated. He has suffered from migraines his whole life, and no one has been able to cure him. And now he’s getting a handful of migraines each day, which I’m sure only worsens the vertigo.

He didn’t even join us for dinner. I went with my mother to a burger restaurant with a Hawaiian theme. I ate one that tasted like In-and-Out Burger, with Thousand Island dressing, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. I hadn’t been to that restaurant in over ten years, and I remembered the burgers were supposed to be bigger, although I bet they’d jacked the prices. How typical. My mother didn’t eat a burger, though. She had a strawberry salad, which sounded gross because it came with chicken. I can’t see myself eating strawberries with chicken, let alone with lettuce and balsamic strawberry vinaigrette.

The waiter came to our table wearing a face mask four years after the COVID-19 pandemic. He took our orders through a digital tablet, unlike most restaurants where the waiters had to memorize what everyone wanted. He just easily touched the screen, and the orders were probably transmitted to the kitchen.

My father stayed home, and he ordered something for us to pick up for him. He’d texted Mom and said he wanted a sandwich called the Toucan, which came with chicken and teriyaki sauce. My mom and I thought it sounded gross. There was something that made me sick about teriyaki sauce going with bread, like putting rice in a sandwich. I don’t think anyone has ever done that. Then again, my father has a strange taste. I always knew him that way.

I sat with them in the living room after dinner and watched a film called The Whale, starring Brendan Fraser from The Mummy movies, who looked as if he weighed over four hundred pounds for the role. It had to be makeup and CGI or something. There was no way he weighed that much in real life.

But anyway, as we watched the film, my father asked me, “Why do you have a bandaid on your head? Did you hurt yourself?”

I appreciated his concern, except I didn’t have a bandaid on my head. What was he talking about?

My mother even said, “What bandaid? There’s nothing on his head.”

“Oh,” he said. “It must be the glare.”

What glare? It was nine o’clock at night. It had to be his vertigo. I was too bothered by his visual hallucinations to watch the rest of the film, so I went to bed, hoping he would feel better the next day.