The Effervescence of Modern Day
My whole life is a never-ending to-do list of things I don’t actually have to do. Maybe everything is aspirational at this age. Some might call it delusional. I want to be more like my cats. They seem to be free of appointments and genuinely happy relaxing until the end of time. Maybe I should also take breaks to chase bugs and pat tiny balls around on the ground with my off hand.
I used to drink a lot of soda. I stopped more than ten years ago, maybe closer to fifteen now. I hope my body has purged all of the motor oil from Mountain Dew from my system. Back then, soda was flaccid without its bubbles. To open a dead soda was tantamount to walking through a desert to find a small stream only to realize it’s camel pee. You still think about it for a second in both instances.
I keep having this fantasy about never brushing my hair again. It looks cooler to me when I wake up than after I shower and “style” it. What passes for styling in my world has not involved a hairbrush in more than twenty-five years. Product, hands, and little care. Maybe a life without mirrors would be easier. There’d be no one to look back at us and frown.
I use Siri to add my ideas to my Reminders every day. It gets it right a small percentage of the time. Sometimes it’s not even recognizable to me two hours later. I’d feel better about it if it were just making choices about the validity of what I was reminding myself to do. “Hey Siri. Remind me to start Pachinko.” Siri’s over there like, My lord has too many shows. Let’s decline this one and just write, “Passion flower.”
I don’t like having too many choices. Diners are an emotional tailspin. Choosing fro-yo toppings is like deciding whether or not to drop nukes. Shopping for clothes is running fast in the house until your sister opens the door right into your face. I like a menu with four things, even if I don’t like any of them. I don’t like a coffee shoppe that doesn’t have tea.
I feel like couples that have been together too long tell each other that they are gassy. Fair warning, but still. I was once in my government office with another prosecutor whom I had a mammoth crush on, and vice versa. I was gassy. It was only her and me. I just had to power through and pretend there was a small animal under my desk laying turds.
Sometimes I move so many things on my schedule together that I get five alerts at once. It makes me want to break my phone. A lot of things make me want to break my phone. Modern-day luxuries are an errant conclusion. I loved the sound of rotary phones. I still have my old BlackBerry in a box of old phones. When I got it, I felt like Richard Branson and the guy with black glasses from Revenge of the Nerds at the same time.
Boba is so gelatinous.
© Jonathan Greene, August 29, 2026
