panic in mouse park (james joyce style)
in the heat of the late afternoon in the midst of sorting out 10,000 idiotic details a) with discmakers for our new badville EP and b) with cd baby so that the ‘mastered for iTunes that bob weston did for us gets properly uploaded I’m on the phone at least 7 times with both companies even though they’re the same company and each time i think i have it all sorted out i hit another snag on another link page and have to call again and wait because the outgoing robot message keeps repeating: ‘we are very busy with calls at this time and we’ll get to you in X minutes and i go through this over and over again just as my computer screen lights up to warn me that the batteries on my mouse are low and i’d better jump on it or i’ll be fucked and a text comes in from work to say they want me in there early and the kitties are staring up at me because it’s feed time and the clock is running out on all this as i spill the batteries from my fireplace slim jim closet onto my desk totally not sure which ones are good and which ones are dead because i’d popped the old ones out of my mouse to replace them in the same spot where the new ones are collecting, glasses on, glasses off to locate the good one as the thermometer in my head climbs higher and higher because no matter which set of batteries i stick in the remote (and by the way where are the old-school mice i used to have lying around?! no amount of standing on a chair in my party closet will turn up an old-school mouse) glasses on, glasses off, glasses misplaced and now it’s getting later and closer to d-day for getting the cats fed and getting pretty for work and the mouse still doesn’t work and my computer screen is frozen and it’s time to call applecare but i can’t access my address book because my mouse isn’t active and there’s no cursor but wait, the applecare number’s in my iPhone so i make the call, more robot outgoing messages and someone answers to direct my call and can i please give her the serial number of my iMac? and i yell at her no, i can’t do that because my mouse isn’t working and my screen is locked and WHATTHEFUCK!!! I’m screaming at her and she is calm like a shrink facing down a madman ‘what is your email address?’ and i give it to her and that does the trick i can hear her smiling as my blood is reaching the boiling point and i get jake or jonah or puck or some handsome sounding kid on the phone and run the whole meghila down all over again for him and he says he’ll be able to help he understands how frustrating this must be for me (my filthy language over the phone confirming this) so we try to shut down and re-start the iMac holding down option/control which i do and nothing changes but then he tells me that i missed phone confirming this) so we try to shut down and re-start the iMac holding down option/control which i do and nothing changes but then he tells me that i missed two additional and essential keys that need to be held down at the same time as command/option and i’m hoping that maybe we’re close on this shit and so i do the hold down of all four keys and it takes a century for the fucking iMac to re- boot, and still no mousey-wousey and no cursor arrow and i suggest could jake or jonah or puck stay on the line while i run across the street to the the bodega in my socks and get new batteries to be sure they are actually new and he says sure i can hear him kinda laughing while my panic has by now upped full throttle and i do it i am the Flash and i zing across centre st and buy four good ones and he is amazed at how quickly i get this done (what he pictures in terms of where i live and what my world must look like to him i can only imagine) he has to have heard the spoons on the cat food plates that i was doling out while the re-boot was taking it’s own sweet time, right? to him i am an insane person but who knows? who cares? i jam the two new coppery duracells into the mouse’s back and try it again and FUCK! it still doesn’t work and he’s looking at some graphic at applecare a blueprint graphic of mice and realizes that there’s a miniature nipple thing just inside the lip of the mouse where i’d put the batteries which at the exact same time i had noticed myself AS he was explaining it to me and i flick it north or south and a tiny green LED lights up and i snap the flat tin piece back in place and DAMN! it works and I’m in business and i say out loud motherFUCKER panic is not a good place to make decisions from and he is laughing and says he concurs and that i was fun, funny to talk to and i finish up the dropbox transfer of mastered for iTunes files and hit the blazing shower and make it a less that normal meditation and the cats are sleepy again in their food coma and i storm off to work and get there just in time and my god it took what? less than an hour to go from massive freak-attack to total nerve calm and maybe i noticed that while it was all going down in the needle center of my ten thousand swarming bee panic i was, strangely, at peace and watching the whole miserable ridiculous episode from a planet far far away.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
About The Paragraphs and how to order
Or here
