The weather was different from how when I remembered this. I remembered that. I had a bone to pick with that weather, man.
Other than that, everything else was the same as yesterday. No more buildings had gone out of business. There was still that parking lot over there, I still didn’t know what it was for, and there was still a goldfish bowl in the building, or probably. I had never been in the building.
So many people nervous. I wasn’t nervous, exactly. I was just a head and toes, a five-foot-nine contour of my own reality, an ego that was encapsulated entirely in epidermal sensations.
The right way to act was acting like everything was important, so I adverted my eyes quickly and chuckled obediently up in the office when I was signing in. Insurance, yeah it’s under my mom’s. Same goldfish bowl.
It was the fancy doctor’s office, which meant the people were more stressed out, and there weren’t ENOUGH goldfish bowls. I had a feeling, on this rainy day, like something were about to happen. Something were CREEPING, creeping toward some denouement when drunken bartenders would realize some unavoidable truth, when a crackhead would smoke his last pipe and then croak on the front steps of the diner where it costs $12 for a breakfast, when typewriters would come back to life, grow camouflage coats and start marching down the street to a Genghis Khan theme song. And I would grow one year older, 19, that much harder to fit into this world.
“What can I do for you today?” the doctor asked.
“I can’t do anything,” I answered, in my usual baritone voice after getting my height, weight and BP.
The doctor just laughed. Check that, I can make people laugh. Now, at least. In ten seconds, verdict pending.
“Occupational anxiety is common in your age,” he answered. “And every age. Have you thought about the military?”
“Dad wouldn’t let me.”
“Hmm. Yeah it’s tough to go against dad’s choice. But still that is a plausible cause for a lot of unguided young men wanting structure.”
I nodded at him slowly, and deliberated as to whether I would go get the chance to get shrapnel pumped into me, no matter the weather.