Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

Father and Son Another gray hair springs up on my head: a dandelion in a suburban lawn. I’m getting old. I now strategize how I am going to pull myself off the floor, which result in pushing, but not too hard, cause then my bum left wrist will act up, sending pain messages: "This is a test of the Emergency Alert System. Sometime in the distant past you fucked up your wrist. We don't know why, but it hurts so don't put much pressure on it. This is only a test." Oh, my, I’m getting old. Taking a shit is now a sort of study session, where two hours later I reappear after finishing the latest double issue of Rolling Stone . I'm debating moving a book shelf into the bathroom, so I'm never forced to abort because I finished what was at hand. Yet, I'm peeing every 20 minutes as if my prostate has swelled and now presses up against my bladder like dancing with a drunk cowboy at a Country & Western Bar. Oh, my God! I'm getti...

The Proximity Detector I. For the last year, my smart phone has a dumb, if not annoying, malfunction. The malfunctioning part darkens the phone while the phone is next to my ear But doesn’t lighten it when I pull it away to hang up, access the speaker, or use the keypad. It’s broken. The “proximity detector” is broken. I didn’t even know that was thing when I started researching this problem, And found that my particular brand seemed prone to this malfunction. Oh well, I thought, as I researched work arounds. I can’t hang up, so one workaround was to leave messages, which I almost always have to do, that tells people: “Hi, long message, but the proximity detector on my phone is broken so there is probably going to be a bit of silence on the end of this message.   I’ll tell you when I’m officially done leaving the message, so you don’t have listen to a lot of silence.” And then go on with the actual message. Eventually, the voice mail will fig...