The Things That I See

Essays

Sep 6

I was driving behind a Cheetos truck the other day and had a short-lived fantasy of it overturning and spilling crates of Cheetos bags all over the road. At first, people swerved to avoid the accident, but then they realized there was orange dust all over the road and changed gears. Cars were pulling into the median so they could hop out and retrieve as many as they could. One car flew through the mess, not a care in the world, and left tire tracks through the orange snowdrift.

Hydration is out of control. Every adult and child carries a water bottle with them that is longer than the distance from their elbow to their shoulder. When I was a kid, I don’t know if I ever even had water. After I played basketball for three hours, I would have six Hansen’s grapefruit natural sodas. That was my hydration. Kids today must go to the bathroom twice as much as I did when I was young. Parents vigorously check their kids' backpacks for a full, fresh water bottle while handing them a Pop-Tart on the way out. Priorities.

It sucks when you see two people walking who are clearly together but arguing, because one is walking ahead of the other while they are still talking. I’ve been those people. It’s embarrassing. It’s probably about nothing, because most arguments are. No one goes on a walk to talk about how the other person is obviously cheating. I wonder if one of my exes ever thought to tell me about her double life while we were walking through the graveyard.

I hate seeing garbage on the ground, but I rarely pick it up and throw it out. It’s because my cleanliness OCD is stronger than my innate disgust for litter. I don’t want to hold someone else’s popsicle stick just to toss it in the bin. For my clean hands, it’s a hard pass.

A bird once flew into my slider window at the first house I bought on my own in Plantation, Florida. I went outside to see if it was alright, but I was freaked out by its death. I was too skeeved out to even lift it up with something. I hoped another bird would fly in and take it to the funeral home for birds and buy it an earthy casket, the cheap kind, since the bird was dumb enough to fly into a glass window.

My dog once killed two groundhogs in self-defense. So, I guess he did it twice, but at separate times. They bowed up at him, and he had to do what he had to do. As a former criminal defense attorney, I already had his defense planned out for when the cops showed up. They never came. I used a shovel to get him into a garbage bag because animal control did not give two shit knuckles that I had a groundhog corpse in my yard. I could hear his nails scratching on the asphalt as I dragged him to the garbage out front.

We once had 34 empty plastic cups, formerly full of Tom Collinses, on our table at the East End Comedy Club in East Hampton while we were in the front row to see Andrew “Dice” Clay. I was woefully underage, with a fake Swedish bus pass for ID, and hoping that, whatever form of God there was, he would not go on a rant about my pimples. Bada-bing!