Bought a pack of 6 boxer shorts off of EBay, and they’re comfortable and prettily patterned and for some reason have a button on the front flap, and when you wake up from a deep sleep in need of a piss and you’re faced with a button where there’s no reason for a button to be you’d be amazed at how useless one’s fingers become, like they’ve never unfastened a button in their sixty six year old lives. To think these are the digits that could button and unbutton the top button on a dress shirt, or manage a piss at a urinal one handed, or delicately unfasten a brassiere mid kiss…. By now the dong has said fuck it and works it way out over the elastic hem of the shorts to piss away with abandon not having to unbutton anything. It may not be able to do much without bones, joints and muscles, that dong of mine, but it’s not stupid.
Colonoscopy
Not to change the subject, but I only have one more colonoscopy to go. Been getting them every ten years since 40, and they always schedule the next one when you’re done with the last. Scheduling nurse says OK, you’re booked for your 70th, and that’ll be it, she said. That’ll be it? They don’t book any past 70, she said. That’s how you know you’re getting near the end of the road.
That last one was the year, way back in 2017, that a very attractive nurse came into my waiting room, smiled, scanned the charts, checked my pulse, stuff like that. I remember thinking I just hope she’s not my colonoscopy nurse. It’s not my best side. She wasn’t. She was the colonoscopy doctor. You have a very healthy colon, she said. I have no idea if I blushed, as my ass was anesthetized.
Podiatrist
Went to the podiatrist yesterday to look at my shattered ankle and see how it’s progressing. Well, it turns out, it’s not crunching like a mouthful of potato chips, which is good, she said, and the swelling is way down, it’s a lovely human color and doesn’t feel hot. Plus it hurts a whole lot less—does this hurt? does this?—in fact it doesn’t hurt at all unless I’m standing on it awhile. So I can walk on it a bit. I’ll be getting some kind of aircraft carrier sized shoes as my feet and ankles are deformed. All my other birth defects are on one side of my body—which means probably a single gene gave me the hole in my brain on the right and the bum skeleton from my skull to my ankle on the left. But I have these beautifully matching fucked up ankles and feet (“acquired deformities”), indeed my right foot is more deformed now than the left. Some sort of heterochronical fuck up. (Never mind, I just wanted to say heterochronical.) Anyway, I had this pretty podiatrist playing with my (clean and scrubbed) bare feet, twisting them, poking them, tickling them, pinching my toes, and it didn’t occur to me that I’d had a pretty doctor fondling my feet until a little while ago. So that’s another fetish I don’t have. Apparently I don’t have any. I’m totally normal. Creative types are supposed to be riddled with fetishes, kinks and obsessions. I don’t even get turned on by pretty podiatrists fondling my feet. I’m just an excruciatingly normal guy, perhaps a little more excitable than most men my age, but nothing worth writing Freud about. Even the name of my injured foot condition—non-syphilitic charcots—is normal. There was a time when real writers got syphilitic charcots. Tolstoy, Baudelaire, even that greatest epileptic writer of all, Dostoevsky, all had syphilis and probably syphilitic charcots. Not me. I get a pat on my huge naked foot from my pretty podiatrist. It looks great. Keep it up!
Sigh….
Surgery
People think you’re a little crazy if you really like going in for surgery because it’s like Disneyland and you’re in Tomorrowland. It’s an E ticket ride, as the geezers say, and you’re on the ride and the last thing you’ll remember is the anesthesiologist telling you he’s giving something to relax you and you wake up all groggy and the nurse says hi, it’s all done now. Oh yeah, it is. After a few more visits, nurses, the surgeon, some somebody somethings, all smiling beneath their masks, they tell you it went great, and within and hour or two you’re dressed and they’re putting you in a wheelchair with a plastic hospital bag full of instructions and pills for pain, but it never even hurt so no need for the pills. That was fun, I say, and my buddy who’s driving me home looks at me like I’m nuts.
Game changer
This kitty litter was a game changer, the cat litter guy said. A game changer, cat litter? I sighed and switched channels. Hockey news. Guy scores one, two, three times, flipped the lead, a blow out. The commentator calls him a dynamite player, a game changer. I sighed and switched the channel, and then I realized he actually was a game changer, and I was thinking of cat litter. I switched back to the hockey news in time for a commercial. The toilet paper was a game changer.
I blame Elvis
In 1957 a Philadelphia teenager in black top, black jeans and black boots howls like a wild animal at an Elvis Presley concert. Rock’n’roll had been unleashed. Elvis did a few quick tours that year and they were apparently frenzied affairs, Elvis and his band getting down, the audiences getting crazy. In one city the audience stormed the stage after the the last song and dismantled it, tore it apart. Ha. The problem with going to an Elvis concert is you can get killed, a reporter wrote. This chick had the right idea. And a few years later a twenty something me would have been drawn to the twenty something her like a moth to flame, of course. Must be the Irish in me.
I was born in Long Branch, New Jersey the day before this photo was snapped. I had newborn baby long black sideburns. My rock’n’roll crazed uncle—leather jacket, ducktail, the whole seventeen year old greaser look—brought all his similarly attired hoodlum buddies down to the maternity ward to see his nephew Elvis. They raised hell singing Elvis songs and making Elvis moves until the nurses scooted them out and they drove off in their fifties cars to raise hell along the Jersey Shore. I suppose it was an omen. When I was twenty I picked up a newly released copy of Elvis’s Sun Sessions, his first recordings and singles from 1954-55. It was so raw, basic, rocking and real. My life was changed, seriously. It led me straight to punk rock. The Sex Pistols album came out later that year. Two years later I’m playing drums in an incredibly crazy band, writing, partying like mad and screwing my brains out. Ha. Whatever life plans I’d had in 1977 were forgotten. I blame Elvis.
Kids
About twenty years ago Fyl was working in the oncology dept at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and they put on a picnic for all the oncology kids in Travel Town in Griffith Park and I was volunteered as a 6’5” draft animal, hauling and carrying and loading and unloading. I must have set up 500 folding chairs and then folded them up loaded them back on the truck again. Stuff like that. Eats were from In and Out, so that was breakfast, lunch and dinner. The cool thing was meeting all the strange train freaks that collect at Travel Town. They even had a Pullman car converted into an office and library. A zillion books about trains. Reams of locomotive blueprints. They argued a lot about trains, and knew about every train ever. They all had a train or two or three that they’d pull out of the engine house and go around the tracks on. Sometimes they carried the kids. Sometimes they went by themselves. I got to ride three or four different trains, giant me on a little train. It was a ball. Those tracks go much further into the brush than you can tell from driving by, and they’ve put incredible effort into the tracks and decor. Train freaks. Sort of like HO model train freaks, but more intense. And oil stained.
The kids were having a helluva good time, the trains, clowns, the hamburgers and ice cream. You’d almost forget they were cancer patients. Fyl said you see all those kids in the front row? The quiet ones? None of them will be here next year.
That was a lesson in stoicism I’ve never forgotten. I stopped whining much about being sick after that day, after that moment. Stop minding pain so much. I think about those kids all the time. I’d hand one an ice cream and he’d smile and say thank you. I handed a little girl and ice cream and she said she couldn’t eat ice cream and smiled and thanked me.
New car long ago
Us in front of our brand new car way, way long ago.
That was our second Chevy Celebrity, the undercover police car of choice. No one ever fucked with that car. Crackheads would scatter into the shadows when we passed, no one broke into our car no matter how dingy the neighborhood the club was in. Vatos pulled to the curb figuring they’d had it, and even cops thought I was a cop behind the wheel of that thing. The perfect wheels to cruise stoned in. Big and roomy, pure Gemütlichkeit, even had a cassette deck for all the groovy noisy mix tapes I’d assembled in those analog 80’s. That car spun us all through our late 30’s in the crazy rocking 90’s. Loved that car. Of course we fucked in it, need you ask? You didn’t? Well, we did.
Rectangles
(2019, I think)
Went to Canters after the Paul Grant Afternoon Experience. Yes I know that’s the name of your next band. Had the Buck Benny sandwich because I’ve been listening to hours and hours of the Jack Benny Radio Program because I am retired and seem to be reliving someone else’s life. I couldn’t stop talking like Andy Devine and they asked me to stop bothering the customers. Fyl ate her club sandwich. Tourists walked by in crazy colored sneakers and rectangles carefully precut from prefaded jeans. Bare thigh in perfectly geometric spaces. I wondered about the little rectangles of cold as the evening grew chilly. Uber home.
Technology
It’s a Saturday and we’ve got brand new technology up the wazoo. First came the guy from JC Penney’s with the air fryer oven (soon to be pronounced li’l oven, just like all its predecessors). Fyl had gone shopping a few days earlier. She’d gotten an air fryer oven, a sapphire ring and some underwear. I tried to see a pattern there but couldn’t. Anyway, they delivered the oven. Cool. I got to manfully remove it from the box—amazing the places they can find to cover with tape—and busted up the styrofoam and voila, we had English muffins. There’s a mess of instructions, but I know how to make English muffins. It’s a start. Then there was a knock on the door and there stood a cute young thing with a strip light. Alas, she was from PetSmart and the strip light goes on top of the fish tank. But at least I almost got a joke out of it. Finally there was a knock on the door and when I opened it there were no humans to be seen, just the cutest little food scraps bucket you ever saw. It came with a mess of instructions, in English and Spanish, the air fryer oven came with way more instructions. I didn’t need instructions for the strip light, you turn it on, turn it off. I can manage that. They had them, though, in English and French. You never know when you might need to say strip light in French. In Mexico, though, if you need a strip light you’re on your own. Probably best not to ask.
To be honest, Fyl toasted the English muffins. I got to play with the box. Have to. We don’t have a cat.
OK, another little essay about nothing.
Brick Wahl 