HALF-AWAKE RAMBLINGS THAT I WON'T REMEMBER IN SIX HOURS

So yesterday, I'm at the physical therapist's office, waiting impatiently in the waiting room, when this lady sits down next to me.

All these chairs in the place ... she sits next to me.

She begins talking.

"I have to stop and get the kids," she says.

I look up from my paper and stare straight ahead, wondering if she's talking to me. She must be talking to me. She sat right down next to me and started talking.

"Then I think we'll go to McDonald's. We have to go to Walmart tonight to get some materials for Cassie's project."

I checked my chest. There was no sign saying "Come tell me all the fucking details of your day" hanging around my neck.

I set my peripheal vision on stun and tried to look at her without actually looking at her. I wanted to see if she was talking into a cell phone.

No cell phone. No ear piece, no microphone.

She started talking about how she didn't like her son's girlfriend and thought she came from a bad family.

Meanwhile, I am totally freaking out. I do NOT think she was talking to me. I think she was talking to herself very loudly. I'm not even sure she saw me sitting next to her.

By this point, I'm about as uncomfortable as a whore in church and was trying to figure out a way that I could get up and move away from this woman.

Ahhhhh...magazines!

I got up out of my chair, the woman kept rambling on to herself. I grabbed a Time Magazine and sat a few chairs away from her this time.

She just kept on babbling away, carrying on an imaginary conversation with someone in her head.

My guess is that she had a concussion and was just about half nuts.

Anyway ...

The therapy went well. The therapist was very gentle with me for the longest time, until he decided to apply enough pressure to my bones to try and break them into splinters. This went on for a while and I didn't make a peep. Finally, he asked, "Are you feeling anything?"

I said the first thing that came to mind: "Yeah, it hurts like hell."

He gave me that battlecry from the 1970s ... "No pain, no gain." and kept twisting my arm up.

I have a number of exercises that I must keep doing at home so that maybe someday I'll have full mobility with my arm again.

I typed that whole sentence with my eyes closed and no errors.

I'm tired.

Went out to dinner last night with my boy Eddie Lavoie, his new woman Ramona, the gone, but not forgotten Wendigo and her husband Eric.

I was exhausted at dinner and wasn't much fun. I seriously don't remember much of any conversations that were had there. I know Eric is going to be neutering Eddie's dog on Wednesday. That's about all the information I retained.

And yes...Eric is a veterinarian. He doesn't just neuter dogs for kicks.

I've been offered two part-time gigs in the past two days.

The first is to edit a new hunting magazine that's coming out. Once a month, I'd have to read a buncha stories about hunting and throw commas all around in them.

The other is delivering the newspapers that I work for. Every single person we've hired to deliver the papers for the last several years has not worked out. They either only deliver half the newspapers or none at all. I finally got fed up with it and told the boss, "When you want those papers to hit the streets on time, lemme know, and I'll do it right."

Well ... I was kinda sorta just kidding about doing that.

But hey ... we're talking $100 for four hours of work each week. I think I can manage that into my tight schedule.

OH!! I finally got to see the cover of the book I helped write last year.

The book is NOW supposed to be out before Christmas (it was supposed to be out before Y2K), and the cover looks good.

BUT...as it turns out ... it isn't MY book, like I've been saying. Apparently, a local writing legend actually wrote text for the book and I contributed "business profiles". So the book reads "By Wayne Greenhaw ... with an introduction from Dr. David Bronner ... and business profiles by Some Otherguy and Uncle Bob."

It's very small print, but hey ... my picture will be on the jacket and my words inside the book.

And that...THAT...counts for something.

I'm going back to bed. I'm exhausted.

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QUESTION OF THE DAY

If you had the power to change anything in the world in order to make the world a better place, what would it be?