Things that vex me, haunt me, keep me from sleep:
Losing my previously unassailable human rights
Being late to work.
Ruining by child, by being too soft.
Failing the MCAT (that I never, not even once, sat for, because I was afraid of failing).
Ruminating, transfixed and immobile, on that withering look I once received from a stakeholder, perhaps a decade ago, over a group dinner when I said the wrong thing in response to their monologue about the tribulations they had endured from their elective home renovation where they had to "hide on the fourth floor" while their house was being glamorized from the studs-up on levels two and three (the entertaining layer, which I would have called a "basement," had apparently been renovated the year prior).
The knowledge that my receding gums will continue to run from me like a cold-footed lover and will leave me, similarly, exposed and without roots in reality.
Abandoning my child, figuratively, at sleepaway camp, to gain experience but also indirectly, inevitably, to be exposed to the harshness of the greater world.
Tripping before I get to the finish line, the So What, of life.
The feeling that my brain has so much promise i.e., potential energy, that I cannot convert to kinetic energy, i.e., intelligence, thereby sitting on a trove of epoch-changing ideas that can't get traction because I can't get them to formulate into shareable ideas——.
My childhood heroes dying prematurely. ("Where are his glasses? He can't see without his glasses!")
Speaking of death:
Stepping on a cone snail and being poisoned as venom fills my veins and permeates my heart while on an otherwise sublime tropical vacation, like a White Lotus victim that didn't get full billing.
The idea that I could have already been exposed to the one-celled Cyclospora organism that could cause me to have combustive GI events at any moment of the day or night, no matter where I am.
Getting called to the carpet for the scratched economy pack Hallmark condolence card I took home from an employer several W-2s ago, that I have never once found the appropriate occasion to use, because what message does "Thinking of you in Sympathy" send when it has ink smudges across its golden oval from a production error, which at the time was sufficient to make me feel I could reasonably liberate it from the rest of the bulk set, but not enough to empower me to use it for someone I care for. So what do I do with the beating heart in the floorboards of a card in my stationery box?
Being decapitated by a thumb-wielding murder racoon, specifically the one I challenged, like the Summer Child newb I am, in June 2026 without any warning nor understanding that racoons, which I previously knew of, vaguely, fondly, as "trash pandas," are in truth vengeful, intelligent, insidious beings who like to chase and stalk humans and carry out vindictive acts without warning, but with the fingerprints of premeditated planning, see exhibit A: spite feces left hot and metaphorical on the stone path to my trash can, wherein I had interrupted a two-in-the-morning meal.
Failing my child, by being too strict.
Disappointing that one elder at church who I can never seem to be available for, when they call on me.
Leaving the world to deal with the audacity of my child.
But mostly,
the murder racoon.
