A Day in the Life

You worry about the troubles you have, a cold the won't quit, a chronic cough, a bad knee that has worn out.  The washing machine breaks down because you let it spin without evening out the load.  You don't want to spend time at doctors offices and washing machine stores, and at night, sick and without appetite, you know you must eat something and you make a quick dinner that you eat in front of the television watching some series that everyone is talking about thinking it is a good thing that they have series that everyone is talking about.  And early, you take your Musinex and hope for a good night's sleep, and you wake in the night thinking, "No, no, no," but you fall back into your fuzzy chemical sleep knowing it is not sleep but something else, and when you wake in the morning you cough and the pain in your back is unbearable, so much that you don't think you can get out of bed but you don't want to lie in bed and so you do get up and put weight on your painful left knee and shuffle bent over to the bathroom avoiding looking in the mirror.  And when that is done, you feed the cat and put on the coffee though the taste of sickness and medicine is in your mouth and you know it will spoil the taste of coffee and everything else.  Then you open up the news on your computer and it is the same old shit as it was the day before and the day before that.  Then the phone rings and you think not to answer it but you do and it is news that one of your friends has gone mad, not just rocking in a ball at home mad but institutionally mad and suddenly you are the voice of reason talking on the phone, the one to depend upon, the one who will take care of things.

This is how it plays out, I guess, in the end, people getting sick and crippled and going mad and dying while you talk on the phone unable to appreciate the coffee.