Everything is wrong to me but everything is what I need

The morning had started at 5:30 because of my obsessive compulsive drive to keep a 40 something body at sub 8% body fat and looking like a 20 something body which acknowledges in my world, fitness and well-being as merely a by-product of vanity. All was on track as I pushed through a somnambulant haze with caffeine, until the application of toothpaste ran awry somehow bending a toothbrush bristle with enough force that it catapulted a microscopic bit of toothpaste into my eye causing me to writhe spasmodically with one hand over the burning, minty eye the other giving the finger to the heavens. “What the fuck, how does that even motherfucking happen” I whisper in a guttural throaty tone through my clenched and still unbrushed teeth, it is a deliberately low hiss as to not to arouse my sleeping wife—yes it was a quiet anger. While quiet enough to leave my wife undisturbed it did however begin to stoke my own, as of yet unprovoked but ever smoldering rage as I felt the little flashes of fire dance across the coals.

After packing all my nutrition potions-proteins, specialized fats and other requisite foodstuffs in my bag, finishing my third cup of coffee I was making my dawn jaunt for the subway to get to the gym. It is a twelve-minute walk through urban neighborhoods that comprise a bizarre collection of working poor in subsidized housing, students in $3000 a month flats, professional folks and the people out of time-the elderly who have owned their homes since Eisenhower was in office, a few cleaned-up hippies who still run Marxist societies, tenet rights organizations and other well-intentioned poorly run ineffective causes. People who you can’t tell if they are trapped, lost, or simply confused and I always wonder what they are thinking.

I was one of a very few folks out on a street that would be bumper to bumper with traffic in less than an hour but now it was just me and a smattering of other early risers and two cars. Two cars one of which found the need to honk on an otherwise deserted street. A jarring, unbelievably loud squelch of a honk in this otherwise serene scene-this sound electrified the caffeine in my bloodstream causing me to shake my head and bring my shoulders to my ears while my elbows clenched my sides. Why. Seriously, why is this person honking at 6 AM on a deserted street? I ponder this as I stare hatefully at the driver, has the honking affected positive change for the person, changed something that displeased them more to their liking? ….why, I continue to think, you stupid motherfucker, why…so yes that honk has effected something, but nothing positive.

……….and the embers are stoked…..

The indictments begin.

I begin a mental conversation over an email word choice with one of my two bosses, who are actually more like colleagues, the one with whom I have an extraordinarily complicated relationship who lives on Japan at the moment. This ends with me spewing a string of profanities at him out loud. Ashamed I look around to make sure no one has caught this, unsure of what I would do if someone had. How do you even play that off…you know…like you’re not crazy.

With no witnesses to shame me into humility and better behavior the indictments continue, every owner of every dead plant containing planter, each piece of litter-indicting both litterer and those who fail to care for their property. Leading to anger at the drunk retarded mayhem causing college students-probably because I'm jealous that they can be drunk retarded mayhem causing college students and then there are the generally ignorant folks who seem to think it is ok to throw their trash anywhere or do they consider it a control issue, some kind of mostly impotent power-play like when a group of teenagers walk with deliberate slowness across a street, they stop traffic, they are in control, they have power even if only for a moment.

I see no parallels in my life at all. None.

Then I mock a barking dog---I mean I mock a dog—I squinch my face up looking at the dog who is on a porch and use the universal high pitched, lower lip protruding, mock voice and proceed to make two barking sounds.

It is 6:15 in the morning and I am making fun of a dog, are you fucking kidding me.