Scavenging For Acorns

Paranoia

Part 4 of 30

My life of paranoia is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had. But that’s not to say I’m miserable every moment of every day, because I’m not. I’ve really worked on it to the extent I can, and have been doing the things a doctor so wisely told me, “Try to make the best of things. And remember, there’s lots of other losers worse off than you.” That one took me by surprise, because, really, when it’s just me in my constant thoughts, I have a constant nagging pain. But when I compare myself to others, it helps me to know I'm leading the pack even if it's only narrowly.

So this guy's a pretty good doctor, and the insurance company isn’t paying him because he’s a quack. He obviously can make some halfway decent pronouncements. And if I can’t believe him, who am I going to believe? Some guys at the local bar talking dirt against him? I mean, they might be right, but there’s a big difference between him and them. The insurance company wouldn’t pay squat for the opinion of guys at the bar. And they’re a profit-making company, so you can trust them.

It's really going pretty well. Maybe not everyday’s a good day, but on the good days I'm following his advice to the letter. And for the most part, two thumbs up. The more miserable others are, the better. The other day there was a guy bleeding from the leg. Apparently too dumb to handle an ax. We were trying to call the ambulance -- not so much me but this other dude -- and he and the ambulance driver got in such an argument about the case, thinking that the guy had something to do with it, or was perhaps the innocent victim’s brother. I myself was confused, and he had a towel wrapped around his leg, but maybe it didn’t look as bad as it was. But the ambulance guys, confused, just fingered us all and sped off. It took me to pronounce the guy dead, and I’m not even medically sure when the exact moment of death came. The police came back and called him “A. John Doe.” So, my condolences to the Doe family. It could be that he was a nice guy, but I'm not really his judge.

Anyway, fast forward. I’m always looking for people worse off than me and trying to make the best of it. So imagine the valuable goldmine I inherited when my neighbor’s furnace wasn’t working. Right about the time of the biggest blizzard in the state since the time of Christ. Cold? Like my dad used to say, “Colder than a well-digger’s butt,” and something about a witch’s tit.

So, again, it was very therapeutic to watch my neighbor out foraging for acorns to burn to keep his house heated. My own paranoia receded and it was one of those rare times of comfort that I’d almost forgotten existed. The only problem with the whole scene, I needed to put some caulking around my own picture window. It’s a little drafty. And, dammit, a draft like keeps my furnace running, money down the drain. It's always something, but this is ridiculous. Things were going pretty well, then this. I just can’t catch a break...

Every Hideous Siren

The Big City

Part 26 of 28

Wanna know how big the Big City is? This has to do with sirens. OK, say you’re at the south border of the Big City blowing a siren. That’s loud. But if you're a listener at the north border, you won't be able to hear it. That ruffles my feathers a bit, because everyone in town should know: "Help is on the way! 

I come from a much smaller town and there was one huge siren everyone got to hear if there was the slightest problem: Tornado, nuclear attack, shady peddlers in town, discounts at the car wash. The tiniest town on earth, but one huge honking siren. But here in The Big City, they need a whole siren network, and of course they can blow all of them in many different places, because everyone's having an emergency at the same time. Maybe the airport’s on fire or the river’s out of its banks or peddlers are pushing cheap knockoffs, the sirens are much more localized.

Whether they’re localized very often like that is hard to say. Just sitting here with the typical layman’s ear, depending on what the traffic’s like in the neighborhood, I can focus and hear a siren somewhere, a virtually constant thing. There was the weirdest siren I've heard just today somewhere. It appeared that an ambulance was tuning their siren, or maybe clearing a dead duck out of the horn. It was kind of a whining quacking noise. I passed by kind of fast but the attendant definitely looked embarrassed.

I came back into the Big City on Christmas Eve this past year and was thinking, “The holiday, no one should be in an accident tonight.” Which held true for all my travels, until I was literally less than a mile from home. Sirens and particular roads blocked off because of maybe three vehicles that slid on the ice and went boom. Of course I was miffed, being that close. I had to detour around streets that I’m only half familiar with. Fortunately I’d seen most of them when I’d been lost previously, so there were only a few surprises. I played it instinctively, thinking things like, “This road can’t be an alley because it’s wider than an alley.” Then when I caught sight of definite things I always see, I let out a huge sigh of relief. 40 more feet of ice, about a third the size of a football field, and even with that, I could step on it too much and still end up dying. Thanks to these idiots who lost it on the ice; what’s the matter, don't you know how to drive?

Anyway, about the sirens. It’s quite remarkable how many are going off -- one just a minute ago, in fact -- and as often as they are. When I was in the small town before moving to A bigger town, every siren was a subject for discussion. In the bigger town, it was divided into 4, so you only heard every fourth siren. But in the Big City, if my ears can localize a dozen sirens just in my vicinity, you have to multiply that out by all the different vicinities and it’s shocking. There’s something like 1,300 sirens going off in the Big City every day! No wonder geese avoid the place. They're disoriented and end up in Honduras.