Growing Roots

Lynn, in her always good-natured manner, has been telling me that I spend so much time in my apartment that I’m growing roots.

In a way, though, I feel like I’m growing wings. We’ll get to that in a minute.

I spent the weekend in front of the TV and a book (Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem) watching the Red Sox and Mets get swept by their respective opponents, and watching Mad Men and Breaking Bad reruns on Netflix streaming. I believe that during one particular 5-hour spell, my ass did fuse with the couch in a non-emetic way.  Anyway, I barely left my apartment. Hence the, “growing roots” implication.

But today was a big day. I had to go all the way downtown to see my neurologist and, then, my dentist.

My neurologist—a delightful man with a sing song Yiddish accent and an amusing way of summing things up in a word (he called my white blood cell count, “impressive,” while reading my nearly deadly meningitis results)—didn’t have me on his schedule. So I had no choice but to hit the streets.

To kill time I bought a wicked cool pair of Tiger slip-on track shoes and a way cool red Nadal Nike bandanna at Paragon Sports on 18^th St. Then found a hard-to-find MacBook book at the gigantic Barnes & Nobel. I found a stylus for my Nook, too.

Went to the dentist and got a pretty good health approval. They took pictures of my teeth with an intraoral camera. They asked that I slow down on the acidic fruits (pineapple.) My dentist and hygienist kept asking  how much pineapple I eat. I told them, a lot, along with a lot of oranges. Why they were intrigued, I don’t know. I think it had something to do with a loss of enamel. My dentist is a tall, skinny, statuesque, Eastern European woman. She likes to hear of my adventures, then use insanely gauged needles to numb my gums. There's probably videos of that kind of thing on 4chan.

I later found out that my health insurance policy had been terminated. I’m fucked. But I’ll at least have cool sneakers in the casket. The pair I bought today seem not to have obvious wings, but definitely have wing like things woven into the seams. Hopefully, they’ll be light enough to help me float away someday soon. In a good way. Like a tree turning into a bird.