Today was a special kind of Monday, the kind of March Monday that only the life and climes of the Mid-Atlantic region can fete us with properly: cold, blustery, and gloomily gray for most of the day. There's a strong chance of snow tomorrow, just in time for the advent of spring, which seems long in coming to this part of the world. This is the kind of day that's just perfect for another Emmy-award-winning episode of the daytime drama known as The Edge of Raplicious. Or, better still, Raplicious on the Edge.
As you might be able to discern, the grayness and rawness of such a dull winter's day has made me extraordinarily grumpy and ill-humored--that is, to a level beyond my normal capacity for malcontentedness and misanthropy. On days like today, my cracked teacup of patience and tolerance runneth over with bad cheer to all and to all a horrible night.
In addition to the weather-induced doom-and-gloom, I woke up tired today and stayed that way all day long, which didn't help my sturm-und-drangy mood. It felt like one of those days where even the simplest of tasks took on Song of the Volga Boat People proportions of hassle and strife. Poor poor pitiful me.
The day actually started off well enough. I shaved my head and face without cutting myself or activating any in-grown hairs of the kind I seem to always perturb--red! angry! Alien-in-the-stomach-of-John-Hurt-esque!--right before a public appearance, a photo op, or a date. I figured out the right clothes to wear on the first try, ones that didn't make me look too chunky, too clownlike, or too slouchy, a good personal-professional balance. And I made it to my appointed round, an all-day meeting in Harrisburg, early, early I say, found a parking space, and was in the boardroom five minutes before the hour. Seriously, folks, you just don't know how difficult that simple task is for me most days. We sufferers of G&SSTD (Gay and Southern Standard Time Disorder) do endure so much.
But all was not going to go well. Halfway through the day, the 50 mph breeze that had been blowing my way suddenly changed direction and started fanning exhaust and effluvia from Life's Rendering Plant right up my nostrils.
During the meeting's break for lunch, the catering staff served pie--pie! glorious pie!--a rather competent key lime with the proper emphasis on tart lime and not library paste or whatever it is most restaurants use for key lime pie filling these days. And just as they served this lovely, flavorful, come-hither pie, they up and took away the coffee service. The bastards!
Not only did they offend me by being unabashedly anti-café, in one swift, careless gesture, they exhibited a total lack of understanding of the underpinnings of the American economic system: That without an afternoon caffeine break, our economic engine would be in the figurative crapper. Why, we'd be nothing more than Spaniards of a generation ago, spending all our time lunching with family and napping during the hottest part of the day. Or, worse, we'd be like the French, engaging in "les relations sexuelles" in an effort to institute an "ennui breaker" into our lives.
So strike one, no afternoon coffee.
Strike two, section A, for the day came later after work when I tried to get over myself and practice retail therapy at Boscov's in the form of buying a new pair of jeans (but ones that looked sufficiently old, of course) and a shirt. Mission accomplished--they even had my incredibly awkward, embarrassing size!--but not after being made comatose by the World's Slowest, Most Awkward Sales Trainee Known to Retail-kind, Central Pennsy Division, and being made paranoid by this creepy, lechery guy in the men's department, who kept staring at me, looking as though he was about to speak to me, then would pick up whatever I had just looked at and proceed to follow me around the store, carrying my leftovers in his arms.
He was not a personal shopper, nor did he seem particularly taken with my stellar ability to pick over the overpriced Liz Claiborne rack to find the sale items. Nor was he the type of Mr. Wonderful my good friend Jean Naté always seems to meet in finer retail establishments. And even some not-so-fine ones.
Well, of course, he wasn't; this is me we're talking about, after all. If he hasn't just been released from a state hospital or a rehab clinic, then why oh why would he come a-knockin' on my door?
I can't fully convey my discomfort with the moment, but retailers and marketeers of the world, please note: There's just something about a Coke-bottled-lensed, corduroy-coat-wearing, Pittsburgh Steelers-hat-bedecked, "grizzled Adam" following me with my sartorial discards that does not provide me with a satisfactory shopping experience. My Nordstrom becomes a maelstrom, as it were. My Hecht's a hex. My Macy's a can of mace. My Boscov's a buzz off!
Strike two, section B, occurred when I attempted to buy some toilet paper and Thai red curry paste (sorry to associate the two, I know how sensitive you are) at our local version of Whole Foods, the Healthy Grocer in Camp Hill. An easy enough task, one would assume, but then I would assume that you've never enjoyed the Healthfood Co-op Shopping Experience.
What is it about these "alternative supermarkets" that seems to attract the surliest, most contemptuous, most "you know, I really am a poet/play in a band/got my education direct from the Dalai Lama, a close personal friend of the family" workforce ever employed outside of a Tibetan forced-labor farmers' collective?
Is it the macrobiotic and vegan diet getting to you? Are you just so full of combustible undigestible consumibles that you're afraid if you crack a smile you'll explode and set off a toxic methane cloud over the Mid-State region, bringing on a mass societal panic as everyone tries to remember whether they are supposed to take the Red, Green, Blue, or Yellow Evacuation Route out of town? Are your piercings pinching you? Your tattoos too tight? Or did you finally realize that patchouli is not a suitable substitute for deodorant and that dousing yourself in it offends even you, after a time? Maybe if your lefty-fundamentalist value system allowed for the testing of essential oils in the eyes of cute little bunnies or baby seals you'd have realized this already, but nooooooo . . . .
Strike three. Ah, strike three. Here's where my love of traveling solo cantankero along the Via Dolorosa of modern existence gets stuck behind a ten-mile back-up at the exit to Calvary. No wait, that would just give me something more to moan and be miserable about as I travel down Life's Pot-Holed Turnpike. What happened was that my Via Dolorosa trailed off into an overgrown donkey path, then just vanished into the underbrush altogether. My ecstasy of raging anger and whimpering misery just kind of, ahem, petered out.
So here's what happened: On my way home, I made a pit stop at a public toilet to . . . take care of business. All that damn Diet Coke and water to make up for no coffee in the afternoon catches up with you after a while--and you gotta know the need was real if I stopped at a grimy Citgo (no, thank you, Hugo Chávez--now I really understand how you plan to stick it to the Yanquís--dirty, disgusting men's rooms at your Venezuelan-owned service stations) two miles from home to perform, um, other duties as assigned.
I walked into the bathroom and immediately went from simmer to hard boil, as only a maxed out, fussy, cranky, middle-aged man-queen on the verge of a nervous meltdown can do. Some dumb schmo had urinated all over the toilet seat--yet again!
Lady readers, let me inform you, this is a chronic problem in America: Men peeing all over toilet seats and not making the effort to clean up after themselves. I'm surprised there hasn't been a National Insitutes of Health study published about it yet. It's a problem that sounds ripe for a research grant.
Honestly, though, why does this happen? I mean, if you're going to hose down the toilet seat, mop it up the excess, bud. And if your aim is that pathetic and shaky, for the love of all that is holy and hygienic, SIT DOWN FIRST! With that kind of hand-eye coordination, it's amazing that our society has been able to be fruitful and multiply at all--or that Dick Cheney hasn't shot more friends in the face.
I attempted to clean up the mess and, of course, ended up getting someone else's "water" all over my hands, not to mention my shoes and pants' cuffs. (The previous occupant of the stall had had a "gusher," apparently.) At this point, I was practically boiling over onto the floor myself, detailing in my head a list of all that is wrong in the world (see the remainder of this blog for examples), in my best Serial Mom I-hear-voices-and-voices-tell-me-to-kill tones. But I finished what I started and began to move on. I reached for the handle to flush the toilet.
I don't know what made me pause at that exact moment. Maybe something said to me, "You know, there's really too much pee-pee here. What's up with that?" So I flushed the toilet and watched. Everything went down the drain as it should, with the appropriate glug-glug-glugs, but all was revealed when the bowl started to refill.
Sure enough, a bidet of Old Faithful proportions began to erupt from inside the bowl, with water (clean water, I want to stress) spewing, spraying, and splashing up and over the rim, onto the seat, and onto the floor. So it wasn't some lazy leaker with a plumbing problem. It was an actual plumbing problem!
I can't stress enough the volume of water emitted. With just one flush, there was enough to irrigate the Sahel region of Africa for a year or to water one lawn in San Antonio on an especially warm weekend in April. I'm sure glad I wasn't sitting down when I flushed the toilet, or I would have been treated to the latest in gas-station-powered high colonics. (I can envision the ad campaign now: "Free with every tank of gas at Tiger Mart, get your choice of a vanilla hazelnut latte, a carne asada burrito, or a high-pressure colon wash!")
So I admit it: I was wrong, hysterical, and exhibiting signs of borderline personality disorder for no reason whatsoever. (Except for the icky dresser/stalker at Boscov's and the macrobiotic-miserable check-out chick at Healthy Grocer.)
I so detest it when the facts get in the way of my drama.
But, never fear. One morning when I absolutely, positively have to be at work on time, I'll manage to get stuck behind two cars traveling side-by-side at 35 mph in a 65 mph zone (and everyone knows the speed limit on Route 15 or the Capital Beltway is at least 70, even in the 55 zone), the drivers on their cellphones talking, no doubt, to each other about how slow and boring the drive is and--hey, lookit, there's this crazy, bald-headed, middle-aged mo' fo' in the car behind me flipping me off for some reason. Dude, what the f---?
And then I'll be back to my old misanthropic, livid self again, and all will be right with the world. At least for me.
Like sands through the undershorts, these are the pains of our lives.
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