When You Get the Money, You Get the Power

I had a crazy day around the house today. The wife had to go into the hospital extra early this morning to perform a procedure then she was stuck there well into the afternoon. Normally having the place to myself all day would have been great, but in her early morning stupor she forgot her pager, which meant I had to spend the day tending to it then forwarding the messages to her on her phone.

Usually when she’s on call the sound of pager elicits some sort of audible expletive from her that I typically dismiss and attribute to general crankiness associated with being on call. But after 15 minutes of being responsible for the stupid pager myself, every time it went off I found myself shouting, “Fucker!” in its general direction. It’s unbelievably annoying, on par with having your alarm clock go off every half hour throughout the day.

For the most part I was very diligent with forwarding the pages to her, but every now and again some consult would come through and I’d find myself completely fed up. So I’d call the stupid person back and say, “Take some self-responsibility; stop drinking, stop smoking, go on a diet, and all your problems will be solved.” Then I’d hang up.

It didn’t help my irritability that I was up at the crack of dawn shortly after the wife left for work tending to the worst bloody nose I’ve ever had; the result of the aforementioned sinus cold I’m recovering from and the complete and utter lack of humidity in the air. My nose was already rawer than a cowboy’s ass after a 12-hour day in the saddle on a northbound cattle drive. Add to that the arid desert-like winter air and my nostrils were just waiting to get turned on like a spigot.

I wish bloody noses were more rare than they are for me but they’re actually more frequent than I’d like to admit, especially because waking up with a bloody nose is like one step above waking up having pissed the bed. It’s something that you deal with as a kid but you generally grow out of by the time you’re 4. Or 8. Whatever. I mean, it’s not like this happens to me every week, but realistically if you wake up with blood pouring out of your face more than once in your adult life, that’s entirely too frequent.  

I probably spent 30 minutes in the bathroom with Kleenex then toilet paper jammed up my nostril trying to stem the flow. At one point I looked in the mirror and I literally had blood all over my face like I’d just walked off the battlefield in Falkirk with William Wallace. I was a fucking mess.  

After I got that little situation worked out, I laid down with my feet up, drank a bunch of water then ate some cookies like they have you do after you’ve given blood in a proper setting, you know, with nurses and lawn chairs and shit.  Then I promptly drove to Home Depot to purchase a humidifier. When I pulled into the parking lot I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed I still had dry blood caked around my nose. I didn’t want to touch it for fear the Red Sea would temporarily be diverted through my face again so I just said screw it, and went inside.

No sooner had I walked into the store then Sara’s pager went off. So picture this: I’m reading a pager then sending a text message with blood all over my nose… I looked like a goddamn coke dealer, like I was Tony Montana standing there in the light bulb aisle at Home Depot. Worse than that, I looked like a shitty coke dealer because anyone who’s seen Scarface knows this as a fact: never get high on your own supply. Which is exactly what I looked like I had just finished doing.

I had to laugh at the situation but I didn’t waste any time getting the hell out of there.

Leaving Home Depot I was really hungry, you know, because I was high. We didn’t have an ounce of food in the house, obviously because I ate it all while I was getting high, and oddly I was really jonesing for some fast food, logically because I was high. So I stopped at my favorite junkie fast food joint – Wendy’s. I went through the drive-through, ordered my shit, and pulled up to the window where I realized I only had a single dollar in my wallet. Again, looking like a shitty coke dealer because what coke dealer doesn’t roll with a huge wad of cash? So I asked the girl if they accepted credit cards at the drive-through window, to which she replied plainly, “No.”

Shit!

There was no way I was going to scrape together enough change in my car to pay for my shit, so I was facing the prospect of pulling out of the drive-through lane, parking my car, then going inside to pay with a goddamn credit card. How embarrassing. But then the girl was like, “I’m just playing, you can pay with a credit card here.”

What? Why the fuck would some random girl at the Wendy’s drive-through lie to me as a joke? I was dumbfounded.

I glared back at her as if to say, “Do you not know who I am, you piece of shit? I am the coke king of Berry Hill. You wanna fuck with me? Okay. You wanna play? Okay. Say hello to my little friend!” If only I had my plastic BB gun with me, I would have shot the whole damn place up.