I must thank British psychology for explaining the convergence of annoyances that made Monday the young year's most depressing day. The gods were not softening their next target with that prequel madness. It was just January 24.
Monday actually started last fall with an expensive new electronic emissions-control system, and picked up speed Saturday when the car failed its smog check. Sunday, watching my hometown Steelers fall miserably to the Patriots, I composed the second half of a column that appears elsewhere in this issue (Culture Club, Page 16). But Monday morning, after I called to make a car-repair appointment—always a pleasure, by the way, since the dealership moved 15 miles away—I discovered that Sunday's work had evaporated. So I was forced to reconstitute, past deadline, a pale shade of the column composed at leisure the previous afternoon.
Later, I ran out of paper just as I was about to print an important letter, which, like Sunday's writing, was gone when I got back from the store. So I ended the day mulling the possibilities of a virus eating new files on my laptop, another expensive car repair—it won't be their fault, natch—and an expired-tag ticket.
Better file this before it disappears, too.
The day started as any other, with an e-discussion of touching the contents of the human head. Here's an excerpt from my friend:
• "Yes, we (dissected) the brains with human faces. They belonged to the professor who'd had them for decades. I was allergic to the formaldehyde and, because I have a very weak gag reflex, I was constantly running out of the lab to retch. It wasn't bloody or anything. They were pre-cut, so we just removed the skull pieces and faces and played with the brains. Then we reassembled them like jigsaw puzzles and applied our knowledge to the cutting of sheep's brains. I hated every moment. I like things in the abstract."
Shortly thereafter, or after I spent a half hour in line at Nevada Power's Henderson offices to pay a late bill and to prevent my electricity from being shut off, an office which by the way has dirty walls and keeps an overhead TV on droning soap operas all day, I received this correspondence having to do with my career, or job requirements, or this assignment, or nightlife, I can't be sure which:
• "Like, you, I take the dictates of British psychology very seriously. I think it was British psychology that came up with the winning formula for the British Navy, "rum, sodomy and the lash"—those blokes built an empire on that prescription."
That tricky missive was followed by an e-plea for help from a friend whose day seemed certainly no contradiction to theory of January 24 being calamitously sad:
• "now we are getting ready for wednesday night. our community service group has to make dinner (for) 25-30 people ... of course i have only just begun thinking about this. shit. i thought i could just call honey baked ham or something, but it turns out that a ham to feed 20 costs almost 100 dollars! what do they put in those things? i mean its just a pig! a pig with some cola poured over it. pork and pepsi. nothing else. so now i may have to go to the store and actually buy and cook it. but i was planning on cooking baked mac and cheese and some green thing and maybe peach cobbler (like the canned peach and bisquick kind) and some tea. crap."
By comparison, I thought, as I settled in to watch the beginning of Gov. Kenny Guinn's speech before opting instead to wash the dishes and/or jam gravel up my nose, my day wasn't half bad. It was half good. The cup is half full.
I have the sort of work life that challenges higher mathematics, and perhaps even violates a rule or two of lower physics. I am, it seems, always in two places at once, with the exception of the fallow periods when I appear to be nowhere at all. January 24 was a two-places-at-once day, when my responsibilities at various enterprises would keep me occupied in some way or another from 6 a.m. to midnight, often stealthily working at one task while ostensibly doing the other. Such days are not without their pleasures, but they often begin, in the hollows of early morning, with that childish question grown-ups like to ask themselves: How on Earth did I get here? One minute I'm a preschooler playing with my dog on lawns so green they're blue, the next minute I'm leaving home in the dark, coming home in the dark, and accomplishing nothing terribly earth-shattering in between. We ask these questions, and we know they're absurd, and we wait for answers that won't come, and when they don't come we look harder. We look in strange places until we find some clue, some red herring, to tide us over till the next day ...
For no particular reason, I keep under my bathroom sink a number of antique containers that are either empty or filled with products that are no longer viable. You may have a similar stash—long-discontinued CFC-producing aerosol tins, frosted-glass commemorative flasks of Old Spice, small dusty bottles of St. Joseph's children's aspirin, that sort of thing. Each of these items, I have long been aware, comes equipped with a warning label of some sort—"Not intended for pediatric use," "May poke holes in ozone," "Don't mix with gin"—and I have, like you, spent years ignoring these labels and the perils of which they warn.
On the morning of the 24th, having worried through the night about the rest I needed for the day ahead, I woke with an odd array of symptoms that combined a sharp pain in my left prefrontal cortex with an intense sense of well-being. In any case, I found under my sink no aspirin of the modern sort, so I reached for the St. Joseph's, previously opened in about 1973. At the last moment, just before savoring the little Proustian chewable, I decided I ought to check the warning label. Perhaps, I reasoned, children's aspirin that expired two decades ago is in some way hazardous. The warning words, though, were blurred; I found no clinical guidance. There was just a single, inky fingerprint, a tiny one, from a small reader of old comics.