Remembrances of Things Past

I just thought I'd update you on Situation: Nothing-- the on-going travails of my suddenly totally uninteresting life. While I was once the kind of person who could constantly enthrall you with my tales of The Time the Nurse Told Me That I Should Be in an Internment Camp Because of my Ethnicity, or The Time I Shared a Cigarette With a Homeless Guy Who Was Carrying a Stolen Ladder, I am now the kind of person whose everyday routine is pretty much the same, and sans racist nurses and ladder-toting homeless guys.

This is vexing to me, because I have always prided myself as the kind of person to whom interesting things often happened. This may be because I am cosmically preordained to have such interactions, or simply because I am too naive to avoid situations in which I may be forced into contact with, say, a speed-popping neighbor that tricked me into driving him to an acquaintance's house in order to beat the crap out of him (I thought we were just going to cash his tax refund!).

But as of late, the only interesting character with whom I have come into contact is Mark, a nice-enough guy with a three-legged dog that often accompanies me on walks with Che. I really don't know anything about him except that he seems nice, and his dog has three legs. I like to think that he's really some kind of drug kingpin, and that Pitch, the three-legged dog, turns into a battle-armored warrior dog at night. But really, I imagine Mark and Pitch just spend their evenings watching reruns of Evening Shade.

I guess the sad truth is that as you get older, you're less likely to run into zany situations. A stolen ladder becomes a three-legged dog. A racially insensitive, chain-smoking nurse becomes a guy that's maybe just a bit too into said three-legged dog. And an inadvertent evening spent as an accessory to a petty crime becomes an evening spent with Burt Reynolds in the shade.