“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Sure, only — ”
“Only what?”
“I feel…nice…”
“That’s okay, isn’t it?”
“I guess. It’s just so weird.”
“Are you crying??”
“No, I just got a little WD-40 in my eyes.”
It was true. I had the stuff all over my fingers after trying to fix the door knob this morning. The first thing I did was go out to my truck and rummage around in the large wooden tool box for a working can of WD-40. This took me a while, because there were three cans: two without spray nozzles, only one that still had the little red plastic tube taped to the side, and of these, only a single can with sufficient pressure and contents to work. After 10 minutes of shaking cans, trying out a old dirty nozzle I’d found, and making sure the little red tube wasn’t clogged, I finally got enough of the lubricant squirted inside the works so I could open and close the front door.
I still felt weird, though, because everything was fine. I paid some bills online, invoiced a client, researched formatting for Amazon Kindle sales, bought a 99-cent short story PDF to see how the author had laid it out, joined a forum at ProBlogger.com, and downloaded TweetDeck. This last item was a big deal.
After months of hassling over why I couldn’t see all my friends in my Facebook news feed, suddenly everything was working perfectly in TweetDeck. In other words, Facebook works better on TweetDeck than it does on Facebook. I didn’t have to actually go to Facebook to see what people were posting, and what’s more, they were all there. Twitter worked fine in TweetDeck, too. I saw how to manage both social media accounts from a single app, and all at once I calmed down for the first time in weeks. Okay, I can do this, I realized, and I didn’t have to hate anything. What a relief! — except it felt so strange. I even read a couple of excruciatingly dumb posts from people who should know better and didn’t bother to “correct” them.
Somebody is messing with my head, I swear.
Around sunset I took a quick two-mile hike. Along the way I thought of a way to write about all kinds of wicked things without getting into trouble. I think they call it “fiction.” (Some of us are tough learners, but we get there.) When I came back, I had a couple shots of tequila and practiced surf songs for Los Changos del Mar. My wife was off at a community chorus accompanying gig, and the house was empty, so I was able to turn up the Twin Reverb loud enough to make the cat disappear. For supper, I had bacon and eggs, just like a bachelor.
My wife came home a little later. I hadn’t seen her for almost eight hours, and she looked fantastic: skinny, stylish, well-turned legs in black tights. No, we didn’t. She was really toasted. But the way things are going, we will, and soon.
This is ridiculous. There must be a crisis somewhere, and with any luck, I’ll find it.
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