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Paranoia rides pillion
I’m sitting at a raised desk in a cavernous waiting room – a two-story space with all the intimacy of a car dealer’s fishbowl, minus the cars, plus faux Italian furniture.
Outside the window, early morning Austin is doing its best to imitate soggy olde England. And succeeding.
Somewhere upstairs, my second Ex’s cloudy cataract is being lasered into tiny pieces, replaced with bio-plastic.
I’m listening to piano music carefully crafted to soothe people about to have surgery with their eyes open.
The endlessly repeating two-minute piano riff – written by someone who doesn’t know the difference between hopeful, wistful and annoying – is driving me mad.
I’d leave and detox with Delbert, only I signed a form promising to remain in situ, on pain of cancellation of the ex’s eyeball enhancement.
How long will this take, I ask the receptionist. Four hours? Despite my previous post on the inescapability of uncertainty, I know what’s going to happen…
I’m going to be the first person in the history of this place to walk up and ask the receptionist to TURN THAT SHIT OFF BEFORE I LOSE MY FUCKING MIND. Or words to that effect.
The same receptionist who leaned forward to peer at her computer while checking-in patients and their designated hostage. In an eye clinic.
How many times have I heard the phrase “I can’t take you anywhere”? More than I’ve had hot dinners, as the Brits are wont to say. Not that you can eat what passes for dinner in most English households. Anyway…
I’ll admit it: I’ve been a bit testy lately, coming to grips with my upcoming transmogrification (I now identify as a wandering Jew).
Regular readers will know I’m hitting the road to find grist for my mill, feeding the beast that is this solipsistic Substack. I gotta do something!
Last year, The Truth About Everything topped-out at about 500 views per day. The New Year has seen me lose a couple of hundred readers per day, easy.
Easy when you’re articulating small “c” conservative views on Israel and abortion on a platform populated by people who think Substack has “a Nazi problem.” (As the son of a Holocaust survivor, they don’t know what a Nazi problem is.)
Perhaps the decrescendo’s down to the fact that no one has time to read anything on a daily basis. Or read. Or my predilection for deploying words like predilection, decrescendo, transmogrification, solipsistic and fuck.
It might be down to publishing posts that are all over the proverbial – soon to be actual – map. When I focused on cars or guns, I amassed millions of readers.
To make something like that happen again, hit that share button willya? For my part, I’m embarking on the aforementioned two-wheeled adventure. Posting from God knows where about God knows what. Daily.
The latest wrinkle in the best laid plans of mice and men: kidney stones. Have you ever been stabbed in the back? Like that.
This too shall pass. Literally. But the not-so-rolling stones remind me of the possibility of falling ill miles and miles from my nice warm bed. Which I’m selling or leasing.
Meanwhile, I’ve come down with a severe case of crash dash paranoia.
Ever since I was a Corgi toy first responder, I’ve been fascinated by automobile accidents. I follow Instagram’s Crash Dash videos and YouTube’s modern day Driver’s Ed snuff films.
I’ve seen hundreds of crashes where the victim had no choice. One second they’re motoring along happy as Larry (a Brit of some sort), the next some a-hole has punched their ticket but good.
Head-on, side-on, and most horrifying of all, from behind. Gigantic trucks plowing into vehicles (as above).
Farago Death Watch? (TTAC readers will get it.) “When your number’s up, it’s up,” my mother used to say.
Yes but – riding a motorcycle is like playing Wheel of Fortune where the missing phrase is YOU ASKED FOR IT. Spending a year on a bike, day-in and day-out, is asking for trouble.
Cue Elvis: if you’re looking for trouble, you came to the right place. Which may be why so many people react to my Travels with Charley plan with “that sounds amazing!” Looking at me like I have pin lice in my eyebrows.
Speaking of amazing, I finally got the Gold Wing’s Apple CarPlay to play. The system requires an in-helmet Senna set-up to activate the external speakers (go figure).
The result is only sonically satisfactory below 70 mph. Above that, let’s just say Harmon Kardon doesn’t give me a harmonic hard-on.
I still can’t over the cubic capacity of the XXXL Gold Wing’s saddle bags. They’re smaller than the chances of finding shitty music in Austin. Which I somehow managed to do today and last weekend.
On Friday, my Mormon wingman – whose intel on soaking deserves its own post – and I tequilaed our way to the Continental Club’s tryout room to watch an eight-foot tall waitress make her venue debut.
If you wanted to create a movie scene mocking 60’s folk music as pretentiously depressing, you couldn’t have done any better.
After the first song, I asked the bartender if they sold razor blades. After the second, I couldn’t help myself. FREEBIRD! Nobody laughed. Worse, nobody got it. Except Shawn, who advised us to beat feet.
That’s what I’m doing come May. Leaving Austin to cause trouble – literarily, literally or both – across the length and breadth of America. Canada too, eh?
Meanwhile, I’m Googling the Geneva Convention for some rhetorical firepower to inflict on the eye doc receptionist whose take-no-prisoners demeanor had me asking “ver do you vant ze papers?”
And how was your day?