Truesday: A Random Mind Cycle

Suddenly, you’re wading through the shit like it’s your thankless job, and the urgency to plow through it all keeps you so occupied that you never even question when the shit-storm will give way to clear sky. As if Murphy’s Law was more than just a long paperback joke. More than just some over-blown theatric hilarity, trumped up and put on posters to help the dispossessed and depressed middle-aged muddle on through. As if your life had become the clichéd tragedy that typically makes for good (read: successful, yet not tasteful) daytime television drama.

Or “Stories” as the secretarial pool prefers to refer.

Yeah. That awful set of “circumstances”? Well, it ain’t fucking fiction this week. It’s YOUR life, you lucky such-and-such.

It’s always at these specific points in time that all the queued-up tragedies, which you’ve been dutifully tip-toeing around, just go apeshit and start kicking you in the kidneys. All those little Easter eggs of karmic retribution that you’ve been lazily laying about are all starting to stink to holy hell. Some of them have gone so far as to have hatched, and the results ain’t Cadbury.

[The following is purely fictional. It is an abstract impression of a possible reality. Describing what really happened to me this week wouldn’t do anyone a bit of good. Especially me. So, yeah.]

It always starts with something lame. Like a persistent headache. You drop Tylenol on the thing, but it just won’t leave you be. Perhaps it is the remnants of a gin-fizz hang over from three days back. Or your neighbor’s yippy Chihuahua “Cacahuate” won’t shut the fuck up between the hours of 10pm and 7am. Perhaps you are the obnoxious owner of said irritating pooch, and the gin-fizzes were deemed an appropriate medication for the start of your own problem-avalanche. Whatever.

It’s a headache, and it pretty much blows donkey dicks. All over your forehead.

Day two of the sleep-depriving headaches, and your cousin calls to tell you some truly outlandish shit about how he’s “done with Maryanne and the kids”. So “done” that he’s chosen to sell used cars in the Yukon to supplement “the fuckin’ MINT” he’s convinced will arrive from his burgeoning career as a screenwriter for web-cam bestiality porn. Christmas will have to be held somewhere else this year. Oh, and the kids will need help with college tuition, and seeing as how you’re family, well, you know. You’ll be repaid after the arrival of “the mint”, in Canadian currency, you must assume.

So far, not too shabby. Persistent headache + Cousin Lou is still a douche balloon. Nothing too far from ordinary, really. But then the warning shots start to hit closer to the target.

While getting some pre-workday coffee at your favorite coffee corner/booth/hole/mall-kiosk, the bottom falls out of the waxy cup and on to your testicles (this is doubly awful if you’re a woman, because this is the moment you learn that you have a hairy set of balls, and that your newly discovered “meaning of existence” is now newly scalded, which is super sweet). This is a pain that will supercede that of your head. For weeks to come. In fact, you may never NOTICE another headache as long as you live, just because you are a survivor of such a traumatic experience.

But it’s just begun.

Your burnt-balls situation led you to arrive at work late. For the fifth time this month. All the other times were just laziness. You either stayed up too late watching the Scrubs: Season Two DVD (for the fifth time since purchase), “rinsing and repeating” in the shower two too many times, or you woke up on your front lawn and just couldn’t get it together in time for the nine a.m. time-card punch.

Now that you have a legitimate blistered-balls reason, all your previous shit reasons have showed up to save you from certain absolution.

“You’re fucking fired, dickhole.” Or, worse yet, you might get demoted instead. That’s right, you might not even be good enough to blacklist, but you might be just enough of a turd to humiliate publicly.

You and your headache shuffle on down to the mailroom and report for duty. Let’s hope your “benefits package” has a supplemental insurance policy for Second Cousins: Twice Removed (the second of which involved a county judge), ‘cause Maryanne will be calling any goddamn minute to ramble on about “Western Union” this and “I aaaayuum uhh indy-pendunt wuhmone” that. She was pretty back when she had teeth.

Your headache battles your balls for the attention of your mind’s directive to “self preserve through recognition of pain sources”. It’s a tight race, but the balls continue to win.

Or lose, depending on how good you are with “positive thinking”.

Then, as if programmed by satan himself, the floodgates finally give way and the mudslide of utter personal disaster hurtles down toward the town of You with a fury unseen since the night you were obviously, accidentally conceived.

Your significant other apparently left you ten voice messages on the cell phone that you left at the coffee corner/booth/hole/mall-kiosk where you abandoned it after running from the creamer stand, screaming, gently cupping your manhood.

Apparently you amassed quite an impressive number of parking tickets this past year. And by “amassed” I mean: irreverently stacked in your glove box. Well, your significant other, who borrowed your car today because theirs is in the shop, has suddenly found themselves outside of Whole Foods without a ride. Because yours was booted-up in a metered spot, which is beyond fantastic. They are supposed to be leading an “Executive Directive and Response Meeting” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean) today, and it started ten minutes ago. Rather, it would have started ten minutes ago, if the speaker had been available to kick it off. By the time they get a hold of you down in the mailroom, the tone of their voice speaks volumes about how you won’t be getting sexed for months.

You take solace in the fact that your balls are probably too tender for any action anyway. But we all know that this is cheap solace at best.

The dust in the mailroom has triggered a heinous allergic reaction and now your aching head has become the holding vessel for twelve pounds of steamy mucus. The constant sneezing only exacerbates the pain of your head, and your crotch.

Your new coworker, Charley, who is profoundly autistic, can rattle off every Biblical sentence that was phrased as a question, in order of appearance in the King James version. He proves this during most of his waking hours, most definitely during work hours. Your love for irony is blinded by your surface feelings of confusion as they mix with your subconscious feelings of guilt. All is muddied by your physical pains, and your wondering about how to get a ride home from your new job.

And then, of course, a dropped crate of envelopes crushes your big toe.

You are rushed to the hospital where you wonder whether or not Mailroom Employees are even offered health insurance (they are not, as your luck holds).

In the confusion of the Emergency Room you neglect to mention that you are deathly allergic to the penicillin that is being entered into your system by the staff. You black out. It is almost twenty minutes before anyone even notices, and you are treated back into the land of the living.

Your toe is salvageable, but the nail is not.

You plead for morphine. They insist that such an injury doesn’t require anything quite so potent. You explain that it’s for your testicles, not your stupid toe. They deny your request, flatly.

You sit in your recovery room with two other patients, wondering why the nurses keep complaining about “not having enough goddamn electrical outlets” and whether or not a room designed for three patients should have three TVs instead of just the one you're all staring at. Not that it matters much, because there’s no remote for the damn thing. Everyone gets to suffer through another Day of Our Lives. Luckily, it’s on mute.

And then, somehow, as if it was all meant to come back around and actually mean something, you stop feeling sorry for yourself. You think about the poor sap who owns that stupid fucking dog. Your lost-soul cousin and his helpless family. The girl at the coffee corner/booth/hole/mall-kiosk who almost cried as you ran away, flailing as if you were on fire (she may have been laughing, actually, but let’s stay focused here). Your significant other, seething in the Whole Foods parking lot. Your newly found autistic coworker who was desperately bellowing out the Ten Commandments, in Jeopardy Question fashion, as they rushed your bleeding foot from the mailroom basement.

Not to mention the fourth patient that just got wheeled into your room. He’s facing the bathroom corner.

It shouldn’t be (further) solace, but somehow it is. No matter how shitty it gets, things could always be worse. You could be facing a hospital toilet.