Bend With Your Knees

Nobody tells me what to do. Not even me.

"Make a list, that way you'll remember everything.", she said. The idea of a list makes my skin crawl. I would rather get to the store and stand there in the middle of the aisle, trying to jog my memory, than to make a list. Like my unwavering sense of direction, my memory is accurate. It's my ability to access the memory that needs work.

When I get to the store, I assume the position in the middle of the aisle, and mentally walk myself through the apartment. In each room I look around and identify what's missing. It's hard. Cartoonish characters pop up to distract me, that guitar riff from 'Sweet Home Alabama' plays endlessly, and scenes from Scorsese movies fade in and out, with me standing in for DeNiro. I once re-lived an entire episode of 'Married with Children' rooted to the spot in front of the shampoo. Yesterday was a stunner, however, as I actually managed to find the 'list' in the back of my brain, underneath my swelling pride, and I came home with everything I needed. First on the list was a new pair of walking around shoes. The old walking around shoes are crumbling beneath me and I decided to go all out this time and spend upwards of twenty dollars on a new pair.

I went looking for shoes without laces, simply because I'm getting really tired of having to bend over and tie them up. Laces are for chumps. I was dismayed, though, when I discovered that laceless shoes are more expensive. It presents the same sort of mystery that I gave up on when I was a vegetarian. It's much more expensive to not eat meat than it is to eat it. This world continues to confuse me in multitudinous ways. I have capitulated and now eat meat and will, for a while anyways, have to tie my laces like all you other slobs out there. The laceless shoes remain on the list, buried in the back of my brain, beside the filing cabinet of useless facts and the pride I dust off every time I wash my car. I need to clean out all of this old junk at some point but it can wait. It will get done; I've added that to the list.