Burdened By Ceaseless Convenience.

You can search the heavens for eons piled upon eons and you could still not find anything to convince me that the clackety bleepy shiney motor contraption I've taken on a short lease with an option to buy does anything to streamline or bring convenience to my life. While this morning alone there were times I was quite convinced the thing was trying to murder me.

For some reason Pico Boulevard was an absolute runway this morning and I did not program my phone to anything I would want so the phone or the vehicle or perhaps a fiendish conspiracy of both picked it would appear like whatever the hell it or they felt like which was Miranda Sex Garden and that got me to about Fairfax before I started randomly pressing buttons on the console like they do in Star Trek and that almost instantly brought along complete and total silence. Shield!!

For blocks and blocks I drove in silence unable to reach for the phone and make a selection. Something, anything that would calm, but preferably something from the Mormon Tab. The panic then started to come in waves as I was sure there was someone I knew that could see me in the cold sterile glow of the instrument panel 'driving myself' down Pico like a peasant. If there was anytime I needed a driver to shout at it was at this very moment.

The parking garage was the same florescent-lit mine-field it was yesterday only this time there were fresh obstacles in that the metal contraption decided to beep incessantly at me as I started to walk away. I tried everything I could to get it to stop beeping. I got back in. Got back out. Walked away, walked back toward it. I told it I was only going to be gone for a little while and that I would come back and check on it at noon like I had done the day before but it just continued to beep mindlessly at me. I thought I would go mad. It was like adopting an adorable puppy that instantly becomes a wild beast the moment you get it home.

Finally, some small amount of rationality came over me and I decided to retrace my steps. This always seems to help when other people make me lose my things. It did just the trick here as well. Apparently I did not disengage everything in the right order or something which is why the wand was blinking and the contraption console was flashing and everything seemed to be coming apart right there on parking level 1.

Once I was convinced I had sorted everything out and found my way out of the parking structure and walked through the cloud of passed-out homeless bodies to my office I was an absolute ball of nerves. How do people start their days like this? The agony and if there is any consolation it is that it has taken the sting somewhat out of what was this morning and what continues at this very moment to be a serious case of mislaid or lost vintage Tupperware.

Is it really a tonic? Or just a reminder or the way life just tends to pile it on?