Death cheats
I bought my first piece of rolling luggage yesterday at 50 because I was always too macho for wheels. That was me, dying a little inside the Away store as I turned down the packing cubes, paisleys dripping off my jaunty Friday shirt till it was the same sad solid green as the color I chose, the color of a thrift store telephone.
Last fall I bought my first ever lawn mower with a motor, replacing a Scotts reel mower. It had dull blades I’d sporadically sharpen by hand, badly, till they turned my United Nation of Assembled Weeds into a Bart Simpson hairdo. I got by on low expectations because my neighbor only mows once a year, but a series of rains left my yard too high for ol’ Scooter. The yard only takes 30 minutes now, but at what cost?
Pointless self-reliance is in my blood. One brother spends 2-3 hours cleaning his house every weekend, even though he lives alone and doesn’t work from home. My mother added nine months to recovery from a hairline fracture in her foot because she tracks her powerwalking mileage every year, and she wasn’t about to walk fewer miles at 68 than she did at 67. While still in Chicagoland, my dad waited till his late 50s to replace his shovel with a snowblower, which means it’s been nearly 20 years and he’s still not over that loss to age.
Pointless self-reliance is a hallmark of AA, Al-Anon, and especially Adult Children of Alcoholics. I was definitely afraid to ask for help , but most of the time it simply never occurred to me to do so. Not when I was flunking out of college, not when I had collection agencies after me, not when I was too sad to see past my own nose, not when I was panicking over blood in the toilet or lying on the floor of the DC office with the tremors, telling myself, “Just 15 more minutes. Nothing important’s going to happen in the next 15 minutes.”
Rachel Zucker, from “The Pedestrians”
Up until yesterday I had a Bandcamp page, where I had posted a handful of sad dad songs I recorded in 2021. One was a slow 3/4 thing about former friends and long lost coworkers. I have so many of both the song was 6 minutes long.
While I am prone to base my self-worth on random snippets of attention from people I barely know, it’s not all about physical attraction. It’s about lost potential energy. I will absolutely fantasize that me and Joey, a fellow temp from FirstUSA Bank, stayed friends. He was handwriting his own dictionary to kill time, since it was 1998 and we weren’t given computers.
I was thinking about him because I overheard some fratty dipshit at a coffee shop today refer to a coworker as “crazy”. Back in 1999, when the temp manager at FirstUSA introduced us to one of the copywriters, Greg, she described him as “crazy” with what I can only call a wry grin. Joey asked, with the sort of sincerity that was all the rage at the time, “Crazy like he eats lightbulbs or crazy like he tells a lot of jokes?”
That manager, T (she has a very unique first name so I won’t use it here), was the ultimate corporate good soldier, which means when FirstUSA was running a promotion tied to “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”, she — as requested by management — regularly dropped “Yeah baby”s and “Oh behave”s in meetings and one-on-ones with the copywriting, design and temp teams. I mock, but I was a dreadful employee. I was dating someone in Georgia and I would run up bills on the line of whichever cube was vacant that day. I couldn’t afford our long-distance relationship on my temp wage, so I stole where I could. It’s a kind of self-reliance.
Anyway, I’m five years sober and still finding this self-reliance mindset hard to shake. I’m not facing any crises, but I live alone and when I have my son, it’s just us. So when my lower back vertebrae are clacking together like D&D dice, I simply cannot allow that pain to travel upward because we’re flying out tomorrow to visit his grandparents. I’m going to get us to the airport, and I’m going to be fine somehow. I’ll use a bag with wheels.