Things That Make Me Happy

[mallorys_camera]

Thirteen hours of light and waning…

Every night just after sundown, I peer out my window and look for fireflies. They’re still there! Not very many, but if I stare long enough, I begin to see flashes.

Firefly season has been looong this year. Fireflies make me happy.

###

I know what else would make me happy:

An iPhone 8 plus.

Portrait lighting! Retina HD display! Automatically adjusted white point! Optical image stabilization! Wide-angle lens! Telephoto lens! Optical zoom! Battery lasts for-fuckin’-ever!

Little Megan had one, and I admired it so extravagantly that she had to let me play with it.

Of course, an iPhone 8 plus would only make me happy for one or two days max, but for those 48 hours, I would be delirious! Brimming over with joi de vivre and gratitude.

Is $799 too great a price to pay for 48 hours of perfect happiness?

###

I bought a new computer. That didn’t make me happy although it’s a very nice little machine, and God knows, I needed it.

###

Also, my new bed arrived. I was hoping that a firm mattress would fix my knee problem since the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone; the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone; the hip bone’s connected to the back bone etc etc, doncha know.

And my knee is better. I’ve been hiking around a fair amount, getting my 10,000 FitBit steps in more often than not, though I haven’t been running. Some residual stiffness. I may try running next week.

###

I hired someone to haul away the saggy old mattress and bedsprings, and other space-hogging useless junk that had accumulated over the course of (can it be?) four years. He and his helper put the new bed together for me since so far as mechanical aptitude is concerned, I am a hopeless idiot who can barely operate a can opener. Putting together a bedframe imported from China would be a total impossibility even with all the YouTube videos in the world.

The helper was this 17-year-old neo-Nazi in training and cute, the way all baby animals—even, presumably, baby crocodiles and baby vipers—are cute. I confess I was very curious about what turns someone this young into a neo-Nazi, so I drew him out, learned all about his home schooling regimen, his firm but righteous (for which read: abusive) stepfather.

I felt a little bit ashamed of myself, but when you’re a spy, you’re a spy, right? I considered asking him to join me in a rousing Mi Sheberakh when the work was done, but I decided that would be a bit over the top.

###

What else? Oh, right. I drove to the library a couple of days ago. When I got out of the car, I noticed that the engine was on in the Prius parked next to me even though no one was sitting behind the wheel. Most peculiar!

I peeked inside the car, and there were a couple of toddlers strapped into their car seats. They looked sleepy. It was one of those days when it was 90° out, and the humidity was off the charts. The Prius’s windows were rolled all the way up, but it sounded as though the air conditioner was on.

Ho-kay! The driver got points for not leaving the kids in a suffocatingly hot car, I suppose.

But the driver lost points for not realizing that car engines generate carbon monoxide. The driver apparently did not read detective novels! Or had never contemplated suicide.

I went into the library, told the person behind the checkout desk, “Um, there’s a situation in the parking lot I think you should look into.”

She was alarmingly noncommittal. “I’m not allowed to leave my post.”

“Can you call security?”

“Security is on break.”

“This is pretty important,” I said and explained the situation.

The woman rolled her eyes as though I was making a Big Something out of a Little Nothing. Was I? Maybe I was!

“If you don’t call security, I’m going to call the police,” I said.

I didn’t want two dead toddlers on my conscience!

I slipped off to the fiction stacks while she was on the phone with security.

A Prius! A fucking Prius! I mean, wouldn’t you think that owning a Prius bespeaks a certain level of education such that you would know that it was a bad idea to leave babies in a car with the engine running? But maybe I was being an alarmist; maybe one of the advantages of owning a hybrid is that you can leave the engine on without fearing asphyxiation.

(A disadvantage, certainly, if you’re collecting ways to off yourself. Hmmmm... Maybe I should reconsider buying a Prius.)

###

Oh. And I found out Al Mart died. I never liked Al Mart. A loudmouthed jerk, I’d always thought. How he’d become such an integral part of the Big Bash experience, I could never figure out. He was one of the reasons I started avoiding Big Bash, in fact.

Still, now he's dead. One of the first clowns in that particular parade to march into the West—the people like Tom or Jerry who'd died of one-in-a-million cancers don't really count.

The rest of us will be marching into the West soon enough.

And if you’ve read this far, you can kinda tell where this thought-train will end up if I keep riding it.

So I'll jump off now.

Comments

[thisnewday]

"But maybe I was being an alarmist..."

Absolutely not! You did the right thing and I'm glad you lit a fire under the idiot at the desk. Makes me wonder if it was her car.

Hope your knee is still OK after your jump off the train...

[mallorys_camera]

The knee seems to be on the mend! (Thanks for asking.) I'm thinking it really may have been related to back stuff—because my old mattress was really awful.