I Woke Up This Morning To The Cold Cold Water

I woke up this morning and found a water bug in my bathroom sink.1 Now, this was literally less than a minute after I had woken up, and my brain didn’t know quite how to process this. I looked at the bug. I blinked. Twice. I decided I would go pick out my clothes first, and deal with this shortly. I left the light on, thinking that this water bug might just scurry away for parts unknown with the light on, much like a cockroach.

As I picked out socks, I considered that the bug was at the bottom of my sink, scampering like a lunatic; if it could get out, it likely already would have. My initial feeling of revulsion was transposed with pity. I would help this bug, scoop it out of the sink with a piece of junk mail I had received yesterday and bring it outside the house, to live the remainder of its bug life the best it could. I went back to the bathroom, junk mail in hand, feeling much better.

Back in the bathroom, I looked in the sink. The bug was there, it’s twenty or thirty legs and long antennae mobbing around trying to find some kind of foothold. But this ain’t no plastic toilet! No, the white porcelain of my sink was smooth. I stick the piece of mail in the sink, so that the bug could crawl onto it. At first touch, the bug went nuts, running all over the place, segmented body rippling, legs and feelers akimbo. Pity gone, revulsion back. Still I tried a few more times, each time more half-heartedly.2 I realized that if the bug ran up the mail towards my hand, I’d likely drop the mail. Then I’d have to step on the bug, and clean up the mess…and I still didn’t have any shoes on. No good.

Now, this thing was too big to fit down the drain, but what about the over-flow drain on the inside lip of the sink? That would do fine! I decided to fill the sink with water, and the bug could just float or swim to a new life in the over-flow drain! I mean, it’s a water bug. This should be a piece of cake for it.

I turn on the faucet, and it takes about five seconds for the bug to flip out, flip over, and drown. In retrospect, I likely shouldn’t have made the water scalding hot. Now to top it off, the current, combined with the weight of the bug, has pulled it to the exact opposite side of the sink from where I wanted it to be. Seriously, a direct downward diagonal from the overflow drain. So I release the stopper and in ten seconds try again.

This, too, does not work.

I drain the sing again, grab a wad of toilet paper and grab the bug’s motionless body (what’s left of it, at least, as there are little black specks in the sink 3). I throw the remains in the toilet bowl and flush. This is, let’s face it, where we all knew the story was ending up anyways.

So there that is.

*******

A few days ago, Joe and I were walking up 32nd street, towards Madison Square Garden. As we passed a church, we saw an old Indian woman begging for money. She looked rather like Mother Teresa, only without the whole married to God thing. She was leaning against the fence of the church, cup outstretched to passerby. Why she didn’t just go in the church is beyond me. I mean, I haven’t been to church in a long time, but I’m pretty sure they’re still obliged to help people. But that’s neither here nor there.

Near the curbside, there was an old black man, on crutches, obviously crippled in his legs, also prepared to start begging for money, though perhaps for some cause. He leaned his crutches against a bus stop, hobbled across the sidewalk, and dropped some money in the old woman’s cup. I considered this to be some kind of super-charity. There should have been a flash of light!

*******

Can we agree that anyone who uses the phrase “liberal elite” in an argument sounds like an idiot?

*******

This is not the first time this has happened.

I went to the men’s room at work the other day. Someone had, well… someone had masturbated in the toilet. Now, I think everyone can say that at least once they have been aroused in a public place, even to the point where they wish they could go take care of business. But to actually do it in a place of business? Just a tad disgusting. Also, I’m sorry, it just makes using the toilet kind of gross, and sometimes, you don’t have another stall option. You never want to actually picture someone using a stall before you, now you have a crystal clear image of what that person was doing. Blecch!

My first thought was that it must have been a home health aide, but I realized that’s me being class-ist, or job-ist, or something. What, just because they don’t work in an office means they have no manners? That’s some faulty reasoning there.

No matter what, there’s a guy out there who needs to get laid, and that right soon! And also, in the interim, learn what is, and what is not proper to do in a work bathroom.

Once again, this is not the first time this has happened.

*******

I believe in omens. I believe in portents, in visions, I don’t necessarily attribute these things to some supernatural power4, but occasionally you see something, and for some reason it strikes a chord inside of you, it gives you some kind of message meant for, or understood only by, you. On the ferry earlier this week, such a thing happened to me.

It was a normal morning, I sitting across from Brendan, about to start our morning conversation of sports, comic books, and making fun of people we don’t like. Brendan was just sitting down; I had gotten to the seat first, and so had just put away my GAMES magazine, where I had been doing a crossword variant. Then the man came to sit near us.

He was older, but not old. Maybe in his mid-40’s, maybe 50, it was hard to say. He had salt and pepper hair in a messy, barely styled 5 bird’s nest surrounding a bald spot in the center. His hair was longish and high and puffy, so that from the front you couldn’t see that he was balding, there was so much hair there. I rather imagine my hair could look like that in the future.

He was pudgy as well, at least 50 pounds overweight, without being really visibly too fat. His clothes were worn as if they were uncomfortable, as if they didn’t fit properly. He carried two paperback books and the New York Times, as well as a small white bag, the kind you’d get from a deli. As he sat, I saw he was apparently in the middle of reading both books, as they were interlocked, holding each other’s ages. One book was a pulp fantasy, looking the same in style and quality as those Dragonlance books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The other was a non-fiction study of Jewish-American relations with the rest of American society.

He ignored the books, putting them down on the seat beside him, along with a satchel bag and the small white bag. He opened the paper and started reading the front page. Without looking, he pulled a soda from the bag, opened it, took a swig, and put it down on the floor between his legs. Still without looking, he reached into the bag and pulled out a bagel overflowing with cream cheese and wrapped in plastic-wrap. He unwrapped the bagel from the plastic, put one half back in the bag, took a big bite of the other half, and started chewing, all without unlocking his eyes from the paper. When he finished one half of the bagel, he started on the other.

I thought to myself with horror, he’s not even tasting the food, he’s just eating it because that’s what he does every morning.

The horror was not with the man himself, but was from the fact that as I watched him, I felt I was waiting a possible vision of my own future.

I saw a whole life in this brief glimpse of the man. A dead end job, one where he could not afford, nor need to wear nice clothes; a life so sedentary and routine that he ate a disgusting breakfast every day as a habit, and considered the walk up the stairs of his office good exercise; a life devoid of personal contact, where reading two books at once, and keeping informed of daily events was a desperate attempt to stimulate his mind and to distract him from just what kind of pseudo-life he was actually living. It was terrible.

Now clearly, I’m not making judgments on this man’s actual life, a man who I’ve only seen once and never met. No, I’m projecting my own fears and insecurities on him, I know that. But did that make the vision less potent? I don’t think so. It was disturbing, not to my morals or to my sensibilities, where most things disturb us, but to my core. No one wants to lead a life that impacts no one, and that’s got to be one of my biggest fears. What I saw that day just fueled that fire in me, that it would it be a fear unrealized.

1. How an elephant got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.
2. Quarter-heartedly? Eighth-heartedly?
3. Maybe it was dirty?
4. Though I don’t not attribute them to such.
5. It looked like a comb touched it briefly.