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wish I wasn't
Saturday, January 23 1999
I decided to take the time today to get Kim's red Trek mountain bike in working order. It has been rusting away in the back of our apartment complex, waiting for a little air in the tires a tiny missing part for the brakes. Ideally, if Kim had a bike, perhaps I'd be able to use her car some of the time, especially in view of the fact that she wants me to help pay for its upkeep.
Today in San Diego was a beautiful one for being outside (no big surprise there), so I walked the bike the quarter mile or so to the nearest gas station and prepared to give it some air. Then I looked down at the stems and realized I'd come all this way in vain; the valves were the fancy kind which require a special adapter.
This was the second event today to rile my anger. The first was a notice from the City of Charlottesville, Virginia, saying I was delinquent $2.90 on the sticker for my Dodge Dart. Now mind you, my Dodge Dart hasn't been in Charlottesville since August. What's more, Matt Rogers sold it for me way back in September. It's such an aggravation to have to deal with a "delinquency notice" when I'm clearly not delinquent. What sucks is that now I'm trapped in the ruthlessness of somebody's SQL database and unless I pay the $2.90 plus 31 cents postage, that $2.90 will grow like a cancer on the face of my credit rating. Am I neurotic for thinking this? Perhaps, but today it seemed to me like the world was a vast ruthless organism out to humiliate and torture me with its injustices in a more insidious and gradual manner than any Franz Kafka could have ever imagined.
The people at the bike shop on Cable and Newport were very helpful in getting the bike up and on the road. That was the one burst of good news in the day. It went downhill from there.
In the morning I felt like I was hungover, though I'd drunk very little alcohol last night. It soon became clear that I was falling prey to some variant of the influenza that has been striking victim after victim in my workplace. I lay in the sun outside for awhile, and that felt pretty good, and then Kim gave me a massage, which also had its good parts. But from then on I was pretty much bedridden. I'd occasionally try to read from a book called "SQL for Smarties," but the material was too advanced for me and read sort of like the frustrating mathematical delusions I experience whenever I get a high fever. Compounding the matter, I think I may have actually had a fever at the time.
--EXISTENTIAL CRY FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL--
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