Bad Start.

This morning my doctor's office called to let me know that my blood test results were in, and that I should call them back as soon as possible.

So I called somewhere between four and eight hundred times, pacing around the five square feet of space in my apartment that gets a signal, resolved to stop only when someone answered.

Fifteen minutes later and I have an appointment for tomorrow morning. The doctor wanted to talk to me. Oh, now she takes my shit seriously, now that she's knows I've got fucking swine flu or ringworm or polio or something. I was right. HA.

But of course, I'm terrified right now, because I'm pretty sure I do have something horribly wrong with me, even though I'm quite convinced it's not polio.

So all of this business was fresh on my brain as I slugged out of my apartment and into the sunshine, and I remembered it's Street Cleaning Day. I didn't so much remember Street Cleaning Day as much as I keenly observed the warning signs taped to the trees that were absent the night before, but either way, my car must be moved.

Are you familiar with Street Cleaning Day, this most treacherous of customs? One day plucked from the month where you're given 24-hours notice to move your car to an undisclosed location during the hours of 9am to 3pm or suffer the irritating, quivering, loathsome fury of being gifted a bright orange $50 parking ticket, which, like celebrity deaths, often come in threes? They never clean the streets, either. The city just threatens its inhabitants that someday, somehow, the streets might be cleaned, and it might possibly might happen on this obscure day picked entirely at random. It's all guesswork.

It was 9:05. I was very late for work, but that's really nothing new. I'm always late. There's a strong possibility that I was shaking a little on my way to my car, because I was, and I still am, extraordinarily nervous to go to the doctor tomorrow. I expect the worst. My heart thrashed, my stomach was all coiled and twisty. Still is right now, really, but saying it is calming.

I slid into my car, thankful to have escaped a Street Cleaning tick--NO. FUCKING BITCH. FUCKING BULLSHIT PIECE OF UGLY FUCK, I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU VILE, SHIT-EATING BUCKET OF SPIDER LEGS AND ABORTIONS, YOU COCKSMOKING ANAL ASS WHORE, I WILL STRANGLE YOUR CAT AND INFECT YOUR CHILDREN WITH MY CRAZY, DEADLY, TUMOROUS, DISFIGURING DISEASE--

As I reached out my window and pulled the ticket into my car, punching my horn, a neon traffic vest flashed in the rear-view mirror. Of course Lovely Rita was still there, haughtily slapping out tickets. She must have thumped this on my windshield thirty seconds before I stepped out of my apartment. Fucking meter maids.

I cranked on my car and gunned it into a u-turn, slamming on the breaks beside the meter maid, fiendish Nazi that she is. I know the job market's tough, but being a city parking enforcer is like the the lowest of low, it's voluntary servitute. Fucking scabs, turning their backs on the aggregated human race.

"Five minutes? Really?" I snapped at her. She just stared at me, holding her stupid fucking little ticket-emitting machine, and I wanted to grab it out of her stupid little hands and smash it. "Do you really hate people that much? Do you delight in dispensing misery with your tickets?" She didn't say anything, just continued to stare at me, unmoving.

I started to laugh. "Thanks a fucking lot for the ticket," I sneered, jamming as much sarcasm as I could into the sentence. And then I drove off to park my car elsewhere.

Work is crazy busy right now, I've been doing eleven, twelve hour days for the past two weeks, I probably have cancer, and I got a fucking parking ticket. I want to do that thing where I decide things will work out for me, and then they do. I don't like dreading the days, being constantly unsettled and annoyed by everything. I mean, look at the blogs, I've been on this kick for months. It's horrible. Snap out of it, me.

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