Gray Day

It was a gray day. It was the kind of day that Lorenzo De St. Germain auf Flugelhorn used as a model when he invented the color gray in 1835 (he later invented grey for Britain, Australia and Canada). I had just parked my car at work, gotten out to take the “walk of not exactly death but certainly not joy sort of like blah blah blah” into the building when I noticed one of my tires was flat. Flat as a pita pocket. Flatter than my singing voice. As flat as Wile E. Coyote when he’s run over by his own road grader that he bought from the Acme Company. My tire was so flat members of the Flat Earth Society had gathered around it for their monthly meeting. One of them handed me a corn muffin during the president’s opening remarks.

I went to my desk and fumed. Why God? Why did you let this happen to me on this day of all days: Monday February 4, 2013, a day that has absolutely no special meaning to me whatsoever. Why? With no answer forthcoming I started working, but with every request I filled or question I answered I felt more and more empty inside. Just as my tire was devoid of air, I was lacking the will to work.

On my lunch break, 30 minutes that I usually use to write strongly worded letters to the editor of Dishtowel Quarterly (Really? Green is the color of the year for dish rags and tea towels? I think not), I instead was forced to go outside in the Arctic temperature of 26 degrees and change my tire. With my fingers turning black from hypothermia and the air blue from my swearing I got my spare tire on. And when I lowered the car back down to the ground . . . it was flat as well.

Good one God. Pure comedy gold.

Annnnyyyyyway, I went back inside to call my sister to see if she could bring her air pump out and get the spare filled enough so I could drive home. I tapped the number into my cell phone  . . . and it had been deactivated.

Oh, I get it. I’m still asleep and having a dream. I went along with it and danced in my cubicle to a medley of Bee Gees songs then slammed my hand in my filing cabinet drawer.

After bandaging my hand and signing the paperwork for my written warning about playing disco music in a confined space I called my sister from my work phone. With the remaining minutes of my lunch break I went online to reactivate my cell phone and for the first time all day something went well. A few clicks of the mouse and I had my service back. Shortly after that my sister called. She had gotten my spare tire filled enough that the car was drivable.

It was still a gray day, like a concrete slab had been poured into the sky by travelers who took our money and never came back to finish the work. But I wouldn’t be stranded and forced to sleep under my desk with cheese doodle crumbs and pebbles that get caught in the sole of my shoe. My phone worked again . . . now that I didn’t need it.

Yes, it all turned out ok. Of course, I had to spend over $20 to put time on my Tracphone to get it reactivated and then today another $16 to get the tire plugged. Hmm.

It was a black day. The kind of day that St. Cuthbert of Ufnagel om Doom used as a model when he invented the color black in the 4^th century . . .

Adventures in Shopping

I have a cell phone mainly for emergency purposes. I don’t text, I don’t tweet, I don’t watch Israeli action movies on it, I don’t take pictures of every single thing I see and post it on Tumblr, I can’t land a Harrier jet on an aircraft carrier, I can’t control the route of a city bus, I can’t read John Grisham’s latest tome of good lawyer vs. bad lawyer. I carry the phone with me and occasionally make a call.

To save money I have a Tracphone. There is no $80/a month plan with so many conditions and provisions you need a major in accounting with a minor in international law to understand the contract you are signing in blood. To keep a Tracphone active you add a minimum of 20 minutes to the phone every 3 months at a cost of $20. If you miss your end date, however, then you have to call the company, talk to a man with a Pakistani accent named Steve and jump through hoops to get it reactivated. I believe the last time I had to purchase an elephant and teach it to use its trunk to blow “Melancholy Baby” on a trumpet before my service was restored.

Last Friday was my last day to get a new card to put minutes on before my phone deactivated. I went first to a local grocery store I knew sold the cards. The store was packed with what appeared to be lunatics from an asylum, wandering the aisles, gape-mouthed and drooling. I bobbed and weaved through the throng, got to the Tracphone display stand only to see the $20 cards sold out. Oh, they had plenty of the expensive cards: 200 minutes, a years worth of minutes, enough minutes to connect with the other side and call your dearly departed Aunt Gertrude to ask why Uncle Fred can’t stop farting when he walks. If I had wanted to take out a loan from the man named Murray who sat behind a desk snacking on oyster crackers, I could have had my card.

Instead I got back in my car, fought the traffic to drive through the intersection to the Rite Aid on the other side of route 24. I wandered the empty aisles until I found the display and . . . they were sold out of the $20 cards also. “What’s going on here?” I thought. Have I stumbled onto a vast, global conspiracy to deplete the stock of Tracphone cards? Were their men in black suits watching me, recording my thoughts and catching my skin flakes in tightly wrapped tin foil? Were the Lizard People using Soviet manufactured satellites to track the bar code imprinted on a computer chip that was embedded in my left nostril?

I decided it was all a coincidence and left the store in a huff, giving an odd glance to a man in a dark suit perusing a copy of Global Conspiracy Magazine. I drove to yet another grocery store where finally, I found my $20 phone card.

I should have ended my painful shopping trip right there but no, I made the fateful decision to buy a few groceries. It was during my time in the bread, egg and cheese aisle that I heard the thing that haunted the rest of my weekend. I was happily picking out a package of provolone cheese when a family passed behind me. It was a Norman Rockwellian scene: A mother with her three children in tow, shopping for the family’s basic needs. One of the children asked if they could buy a particular item. I couldn’t understand what the child said but the mother’s response flattened me.

“No,” she replied, “those always loosen you up too much.”

I have never vomited in a grocery store and I was determined to keep that streak alive. The bile that rose in my throat from the graphic image that popped into my head with a devious grin, stayed in my mouth. I choked on it. Choked hard. I ran to the check-out, barreling over an old woman trying to choose between extra-absorbent and super extra-absorbent paper towels. I showed the clerk the items in my hands, threw a wad of money at her and ran from the store.

Once in my car, I wept openly. The world was a darker, danker place and my innocence had been tossed into the trash. I hate shopping on a Friday night.