Paranoia
By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male
I have been struggling this
week to put together a true event in my life that would be a subtle admission
that I am a muddled male without making me look too bad in comparison to Ann,
my wife, who struggles to keep me among the living by sharing secrets with our
dentist in an attempt to get him to lecture me about my eating habits while my
mouth is full of dental tools and I can’t do anything but lay there and listen
while he stands over me waving a high speed drill and a needle with which he
inflicts pain while claiming that he is doing it to prevent pain.
What Ann doesn’t realize is that I can hear everything
she says concerning my addiction to French fries and pop because I am strapped
in the chair across the half-wall from the chair in which she sits elucidating
my flaws. I guess this came to mind
tonight because I am schedule for an expensive, multiple gold-crown replacement
this week at which time I am likely to receive another lecture at the
instigation of my wife. I know this will
happen because I received a preview of her current concerns when we went
together to visit with DJ, our doctor, to get our annual checkup at which time
she again recited my culinary sins.
But what I had planned to share has
to do with what Ann calls my paranoia. I
spent, you see, fifty years in an area that is now rapidly becoming over
populated with legal pot smokers, many of whom started their career as illegal
pot smokers. Which explains my habit of
locking my car even as it sits in my own driveway high on Sweetwater Hill. Ann, who after moving back to Utah resumed
the Utahan’s tendency to assume that everyone is honest and there is no reason
to lock anything, badgers me because I have a habit of locking my car even if
it is sitting in our locked garage. Same
with the house. “Don’t worry about locking the house,” she says, “we’ll be back in a week and what burglar
would be dumb enough to hike all the way up here in the snow just to break into
a house that contains nothing desirable.”
Luckily I have been able to trump her trust with my paranoia and we lock
the house with a dead bolt even when we just go out to shovel snow off the deck
or stand in the yard and pull weeds. And
I won’t even mention my tendency to shred every piece of paper that carries any
mark that might identify it as having once belonged to me. I am known at the Logan dump as the bag man
for the bales of shredded identifiers I carefully place into the recycle bins
and then stir them in to make certain that mine and all the others are mixed together
so as to complicate any attempt to identify me by reassembling my particular shreds.
I have decided that I am going to
place a sign at the entrance to our property that notifies any potential
burglar that a simple, poor engineer lives here who already has spent his
retirement and who has nothing of value to steal except his iPhone which is
strapped to his chest at all times in a locked holster that will explode if
touched by anyone other than himself. And
if the burglar does take the risk and causes the phone to explode, the burglar
will likely be covered all over with bits and pieces of an unhealthy man. The sign will also include a note that tells
the potential burglar that he/or she (to be politically correct) should go down
the hill to the wealthy, un-muddled mathematician’s house where he likely has
gold and diamonds laying around in neat piles arranged according to the
Pythagorean theorem and will be easy to load.
Oh yes, I will note, bring a large bag.
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