Waiting for Jack Lo

January 3, 2015
New Year’s Resolutions: Punctuality

Our county hospital was built fifteen years ago – “state of the art,” meaning bright, shiny; new car smell. Now the upholstery is worn; the car smells of dust, dog, and spilt coffee.

     “T’s shit,” the guy behind me is “jes’ sayin.’” The guy he’s sayin’ it to hawks up an interrogatory hunk of phlegm. “Yer rite,” he says. It’s because “you cain’t trust nothin’ from nobody”.

     He doesn’t mean that even honest people can have wrong information. Or that our ears aren’t what they were when we were hunter-gatherers: they’ve become duller, and the interfering distance from earhole to brainpan is greater.

     So, Jack Lo’s surgery was at eight-thirty, not ten, and I’ve missed out if I wanted to see him beforehand, which I did.

     “Fitty-cents for a damn stick of bacon” in the cafeteria; “near nine damn dollars for breakfast.” And now, in the surgery waiting room coffee is free (while “Shit!” he paid for his: “Nobody tole me.”).

Guide me, O thou great iHova

We are a noisy, rank, ugly species, mottled angry-pink and saggy-gray; leaking blood, shit, pus, piss, tears, sweat, air - stink. As Martial knew, and Juvenal knew better; as Swift knew, and Hogarth, Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, Aristophanes, George Grosz. My heroes. Did these misanthropes necessarily hate themselves as much as they hate others? Not necessarily – it wasn’t a requirement that they did; but it had to help.

Leaking air constantly: not just breathing; farting, belching, hacking, whining and whistling through our noses; talking! Yet only these two in the crumbling surgery waiting room talk with each other; most are on their shiny new-car-smelling phones talking or tweeting about: health insurance, hair products, rain, skin rashes, weight, rot, death.

     We’re increasingly trapped in these ever-thinner digital brains. So, we are no longer able to hear the sky, see the colors of a G-minor seventh, lick words off a page, touch anything outside of ourselves.

So modern-day misanthropists? - They have to hate themselves, right? Because for most, there is no one else.

k