Well today has been fun.

And by fun, I mean moist.

Today started off like most Tuesdays, with a therapy session. After yesterday’s emotional swamp clearance (sorry you folks had to see all that, but I am feeling much better now, thanks), today’s session was fairly routine and low key.

In a weird way, I wish my emotional emesis (ha, I know a word the Windows dictionary does not!) had come at the therapist’s office. It just seems like it would have been more useful there. But oh well, when it has to come out, it has to come out.

Still, I suppose I wouldl be better off if I had some way of letting the darkness and nastiness out a little bit at a time instead of it building up inside me till it gets so toxic I have to regurgitate it onto the page and leave it there to dry.

Anyhow, so therapy was not anything to write home about, although I did call him to task for getting caught up on semantics, and I am quite proud of myself for that.

I am sick and tired of ending up in pointless and fruitless dissections of word choice with the man. Sure, I recognize that choice of words can be very revealing and there is some merit to the discussion of why a patient says X instead of Y.

But past a certain point, it just gets really fucking irritating to be trying to make a point of great emotional importance and deep personal meaning and have him get bogged down on why I said “destroy” when “destroy” means it can’t come back, and blah blah blag.

NOT MY POINT.

I think he got the message.

So after that, I had a doctor’s appointment. But not until 11:15, leaving me with something like two hours to kill.

Normally, if I have a doctor’s appointment after therapy, Joe takes me to it and waits then takes me home. But this one was unreasonably late. So instead, I had him drop me off at the White Spot near my doctor’s office, and I chilled there for a while.

I ordered brunch, which Joe was nice enough to bankroll (he is a SAINT), which was a kind of breakfast bowl thing. It sounded good on the menu, with layers of bacon, cheese omelet, hash browns, and so on, but when it arrived, it just seemed gross to me. I hate it when my tastes do a flipflop like that. Made me wish I had gotten a more normal breakfast with all those same things cleanly separated like decent breakfast items. And I am the guy who usually loves mixing things.

But this time… meh. I mean, I ate it, and it tasted fine. I just gazed longingly over at the normal breakfast another patron ordered.

Anyhow, I lingered at White Spot, drinking Diet Coke and reading Mysterious Planet, a juvenile by Lester Del Ray from 1951. It is a damned good book, regardless of it being written with 13-17 year old boys in mind. He does a great job of both keeping the pace up and providing enough genuine twists, turns, and cliffhangers to make the whole thing quite the thrilling read.

Sure, the characters are pretty cardboard (but likeable) and it certainly bears the markings of a previous era of what it meant to be a boy and what boys wanted, but that is no barrier to me. In fact, it is rather nice to visit a simpler and more innocent era, where they were sure that in the future there would be no more wars and humanity would be living all over the Solar System and we would all liver longer, safer, happier lives.

As a Gen X guy, I crave that kind of optimism and verve like a man dying of thirst craves water. We are the generation of irony and yet we are irresistibly drawn to un-ironic things. Granted, we might enjoy them ironically, but we also just plain love them for their innocent simplicity.

It is like the bourgeois search of the genuine taken to the metacultural, decadist level.

Result of doctor’s appointment : My finger is cleanly on the mend, despite still resembling a zombie chew toy. I have five more days of antibiotics to take, and then I can finally taking the dressing off my finger and resume typing with all ten fingers already.

And boy, am I looking forward to that. My typing is so much slower and clumsier with my right index finger out of commission. And the rest of the fingers on that hand keep cramping up and being a pain because they do not want to do the extra work.

For a writer like me, it is like trying to talk with a cleft palate.

So after the doc, I took the bus home, got my prescription for more Cephelex filled, then headed home… only to realize that the worst had happened.

I had forgotten my keys!

Forgetting your keys is always bad, but I knew I was extra doomed, because I knew Joe and Julian would both be asleep (Joe works graveyard, and Julian matches his sleep schedule to Joe’s) and so there was nobody awake to let me in.

I tried the buzzer a bunch of times. Nope, no response. I waited around hoping someone else from my building would be coming in. After all, every other time I come home, there is someone else who wants to get in at the same time. But nope, no dice.

So I trudge over to Safeway, and ask to use the phone at the courtesy desk. I call Joe’s cell phone three times. But nope. No answer.

Finally, I have to call poor Felicity, wake her up, and get her to drive over and rescue me.

It was that, or resort to scratching on the door and whining.

So eventually I got in, but it was not a fun time.

But it’s over now, so who cares? It’s an anecdote now.