small details

Rick Berlin
Small
Published in
2 min readJun 26, 2020

of the day — the laundry, taking out garbage, making the bed, clumping cat shit out of the litter box, getting the list of to-do’s crossed-off off one-by-one at day’s end. groceries, vitamins, idiot shopping, dishes, vacuum, phone calls, emails, twarts, bills paid — they are endless and they keep me in line. my lumbering 69-yr-old body likes doing housework minutiae, holding insanity at bay with regularized chaos. ‘i do, therefore i am’. ‘clean up your room and make your bed. it will quiet the blues,’ my best friend’s mom, Weastie, admonished. (she later sat in a car, garden hose from exhaust to window and killed herself.) so i wonder how i will handle NOT being able to look after everything. not being able to wipe my own ass. will i lose it? will i be able to bear, let alone ask friends and family to handle the detritus of my day? will i stand for it? will i not want others to be at my beck and call? why clutter up their lives with my clutter? or will i become a stinko curmudgeon like my Uncle Andy and chase help out of the apartment with a cane?

This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press

About The Paragraphs and how to order

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