Turn Down The Volume

When you march
to the beat of your own drummer,
you risk losing the band.
– Halt & Catch Fire

Someone who must’ve been pretty smart said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

He had awoke simply wracked with pain, feeling like he just couldn’t get out of bed.

Still dark.  Big dog aside the bed, snoring like a two-hundred-pound brown bear.

Only God knows why but his next thought was a vision of Stephen Hawking followed by that sonuvagun who wrote a best seller with his left foot.

The old man got out of bed.

First thing he did wrong was turn on his phone.  The old man was difficult to reach and he liked it that way.

Phones been exploding into flames, which seemed too much like a Biblical forewarning.

His phone was blinking.

He always talked about maintaining a positive attitude.  The old man had once dated a forty-year-old who told him her life story over dinner at Hung Far Low – actual Chinese restaurant in downtown Portland.  Between the dumplings and General Tso’s chicken, she admitted, “I sometimes wish I hadn’t been so pretty in high school.”  Dated once.

Test results are in, the blinking, possibly explosive phone told him.  Took him an hour to work up the nerve to make the call.  In that hour, he made the bed, washed the dishes, fed the dogs, drank a couple cups of coffee.  Ate a banana.

He also figured, if it’s cancer, definitely get a memoir out of it.  Anything tragic, he’d just say, well, that sounds exciting!!

 

Benign hernia and mild diverticulitis.  That last one comes awfully close to violating his rule, don’t catch anything you can’t spell.

He could spell ‘diarrhea.’  Which is sad.  The voice on the other end of the possibly exploding phone says something like these issues doesn’t explain your butthole’s inordinate affection for the toilet bowl.  Am paraphrasing here.

The old man was on the bowl at 0415, 0505, 0645.  No longer thought of it as the shits, the runs, the squirts, no, this is POOPAPALOOZA.

You should talk to the doctor when you see her in a couple of weeks, they told him.

He said he would do that, thanks.

You didn’t get to be The Old Man without being tougher than your average tall monkey.  A primitive primate playing.  But he’d been miserable now for nine months with something  metamorphosing in his stomach and he hadn’t yet given birth – there goes that memoir idea – so whatever the hell it was, certainly didn’t feel “benign” and “mild.”

It’s only benign and mild when it’s somebody else’s problem.

No answers and the bill is in the mail.  Betting that missive won’t be so tender.

Guess the exciting part, must not be forgotten, is – could’ve been much worse.

Much worse.

He turned on the news and how is it you go eleven years without a hurricane, now it’s two in a month?

The old man couldn’t help wonderin.’  Where do all those bugs end up when one-hundred-and-forty-five-mile-per-hour winds blow through the Zika zone?

From the bathroom, he could hear a coterie of surrogates singing, Trump is a genius.  Trump, a genius….  Genius.

Let’s be honest here.

I did not see that coming.