making the most of what wasn’t flushed

My wallet took a kamikaze dive into the toilet. This was not just any wallet. This was my universe.

Cash, cards, keys, chapstick, phone, license: everything essential to my daily existence.

My cash was not in the wallet at the time – I removed it earlier that day because I needed coffee (to be unpacked later in a post entitled, “How coffee could save your life”), and neither was my phone.

With sincerest apologies to Vera Bradley, I sanitized and removed what I deemed the most essentialest; the rest awaits a deep cleaning . . . or replacement.

So I took my debit card and keys out (essentialest), then proceeded to lose my debit card and lock my keys in my car.

I am not qualified for living.

When the poor AAA man arrived late last night in a nearly abandoned parking lot to save me, I shuffled around and apologized and said, “I never do this sort of thing . . .” which is to say I’ve never done exactly this thing.

Do you know what he said? He said, “Really?”

The clincher in all of this is that my first aid certification card went swimming and may be irredeemable. Hence I have nothing to show potential employers when I try to prove how safe and grownup and responsible I am.

Have you ever seen the movie Big?

Neither have I. But I get the feeling that my life is something like that – that the people watching sort of stop and wonder – often – Are you four years old?

I am not a clinically insane genius who has good reasons to forget keys, bills, trains of thought, spurn small talk and responsibilities, dump important documents in the toilet, because I am busy saving the world in my laBOratory.

I am just me. With no good reason to be, and no reason why I apparently was made this way and cannot rid myself of it no matter how many planners I lose  buy.

I would like to figure out, in this dawning phase of no plans, how to make good things from what I’ve been given, even if all that is is an overdose of sarcasm, an obsession with language, and a fast metabolism – and I can’t even remember what day it is.

Update: I checked. It is the twenty-ninth.