Thinking About You

Originally Posted Friday, November 22, 2013

You can't help but wondering what the day will hold when you get up before dawn with an excruciating pain in your back and hips and hamstrings and you stumble to the bathroom where you forgot to replace the toilet paper, and moments later the coffee maker pours coffee all over the countertop for your pleasure and enjoyment.  Dawn barely breaks on a muggy, gray day.  You open the door for the cat who takes two steps and sees her nemesis sitting on the deck and turns tail back into the house even though said nemesis has run away in the opposite direction upon seeing you.  You look at the pile of mail that has accumulated on the floor for the last week right where it falls through the mail slot knowing you surely have some past due bills under all the flyers, but it hurts too much to bend down to get them.  Later, trying to drink the remaining coffee that is more grounds than fluid, you Google one of your favorite photographers who has dropped his blog and under "Images" you find many of your own, so of course you click on them to see why and you find that you have been collected on multiple sites you have never heard of.  You go to one to see what it is about and suddenly you can't control your mouse and the screen freezes as Apple's little pinwheel shows up and begins to spin, so you quickly restart your computer hoping you've prevented something bad from happening.  There are emails to write and pictures to make, but you'd rather not do any of it or anything else you can think of and you wonder if this is just a bug or an end of life experience.  You reach down to scratch your butt and it is soft.  You have not been to the gym for a week and have not run for a very long time because it hurts your back.  This is the way it goes, you think, even though everything you've done to destroy your back was done instead to prevent old age.  It is a game, you think, this aging, and you wonder if it is better to win or to lose as you think about the coming years, but you know that you don't want to be gone and let others decide what your life meant or whether it meant anything at all and knowing that people will begin to tell all the weirdness they knew about you in joking, conspiratorial tones until they just don't talk about you at all anymore.  But this is no way to think you know and not something to think about at all on such a crummy day but everything else seems to end the same way like the new patio you had laid between the house and the garage apartment that may be too low and may flood when it rains hard which will not be until the summer when it will be too late to call anybody back to complain.  And why is HBO so fucking stingy with their shows anymore, you wonder thinking they are cheating by only making nine or ten episodes in a series and not putting them "On Demand" the way they should.  Everything is disappearing that you were enjoying, you think, and you don't know where they are going or what is replacing them and you don't know who any of the celebrities are except people like Harrison Ford who somehow got so old, and you wonder if Gene Hackman is still alive.  You think about making a fresh pot of coffee but you are lazy and besides you will have to get ready for work in a little while and there will be no breakfast because you keep forgetting to buy eggs and you've eaten all the yogurt and you barely ate the night before and your stomach is empty and hollow and growling.  Once again you think you will quit drinking but it is Friday and maybe someone will want to have a cocktail and you wonder where some of the girls you were having fun with have gone and why you have not kept in touch with them and you think about staying home but you have already watched everything you have recorded and there is never anything good on a Friday night no matter how much money you are paying for cable.  You think a shower might help and you decide to go to work early for once.  Maybe, you think, I'll read a new book.  It seems like the only thing to do.