My Phone is a Plague

7:30 this morning the phone starts making noise at me. A junk mail text message. Didn't even know that was possible.

8:30 unidentified Ohio number that has called me 10 times in the past four days. Ignored.

8:33 the voice mail buzz goes off. Didn't even know it rang. Indecipherable message for Marcy, mumble mumble something about Easter Island and then a song starts playing.

10:13 unidentified Ohio number.

10:55 voicemail from Mr. Price who tells me to call him back at an 800 number.

11:42 text message from my therapist. her cat is going to be okay.

2:21 unidentified Ohio number.

Blissful break.

5:50 unidentifed Ohio number. I answer to a recorded voice from my bank reminding me to pay my credit card.

7:22 home and doing laundry. phone is now annoyingly quiet.

I Don't Need No Norah Jones

Warning: this post has nothing to do with Ms. Jones.

Hitchhikers! I saw some tonight in the dark on the side of the freeway. It was just after that little tunnel just after the Golden Gate Bridge, and these two shadowy guys were standing there with their thumbs sticking out.

Who picks up hitchhikers anymore? Who in the name of MARIN picks up hitchhikers anymore? My guess is these two guys were campers unfresh from the eucalyptus wilds, having stumbled around the redwood trees for three days on LSD and cliff bars. Probably harmless. Probably not axe murderers or escaped convicts or right-wing republicans. But still, I wouldn't stop even if I wasn't on a freeway going 60 miles per hour on my way to see my therapist in the rain.

Meanwhile, unseen, millions of microorganisms hitch a ride with me to wherever I'm going, whenever I'm going anywhere, and even when I'm just sitting still typing into the computer. I am not alone.

Bloody Nose

My cousin was the kid who always had a nose bleed. You know him. He's calling teacher and sitting with his head tilted back, bloody kleenex piling up on the desk. He's the one who stained your parents' minivan seats in carpool, the one on the plane hogging the attention of the stewardess, the one making sniff sounds and figits reminiscent of a coke addict--all at age 10.

Yesterday, he had surgery for a deviated septum, and I picked him up at the hospital to bring him home. He's now in his late 20s, but when the orderly wheeled him out, it was a strange throwback for me, to see my cousin with packed bloody gauze all over his face. Zonked on morphine, he wore the expression of a scared and hurting little kid. I took him home, put him to bed all the while observing myself behaving as his mother did, protective. Wanting to go into the kitchen to get him a tab or diet rite and some reeses pieces for when the nose bleed went away.