I mean, it wasn’t the roughest week in the world.

On a scale of “For all that is fucking holy, the pandemic is never going to end” to “Trump gets the 2024 nomination” it was about a “The grocery store is too fucking crowded and why aren’t those people wearing masks?”

Our black kitty, Alfie, is a wheezy cat. He’s always snored a little, but the snoring has gotten worse. Sometimes, he snores when he’s awake. So, I made a vet appointment for  him.

A few months prior, I had taken Gertie to the vet.

She had developed the charming habit of scooting her fuzzy little kitty butt on the rug in Joey’s room.

Turned out she had a tapeworm. Poor baby girl .

Anyway, the morning of Alfie’s appointment, Joey came to me all concerned.

Joey: Mom, there’s something wrong with Gertie’s butt.

Me: Fucking hell. What is it?

Joey: It just looks swollen and red and infected or something.

So, I called the vet and swapped out the appointment from Alfie to Gertie.

Joey rode with me to the vet. They have a pretty good setup, only one patient at a time. You call them when you get there and they call you back when it’s safe to go in.

While we waited for our callback, Joey fussed at me.

Joey: Mom, you have to hold the carrier from underneath.

Me: No you don’t, it’s fine. The handle is fine.

Joey: Do you think she can get out?

Me:…

Then the vet called. I managed to carry Gertie in without dropping her or her pulling a Houdini.

Gertie wasn’t happy, but she submitted. She kind of looked like she was trying to do an impression of a bearskin rug.

The vet and the technician checked her out.

Vet: Ummm…what exactly do you think is wrong with her butt?

Me: Yeah, I uh, I’m not sure. I didn’t look at it.

We all had on masks, but that didn’t stop me from reading the expression on both their faces which said “Are you, perhaps, a dumbass?”

Me: My son said she needed to be looked at. I didn’t give a second opinion.

Then, it occurred to me that I had only brought Gertie into this practice twice and both times I wanted them to look at her butt.

Crap. They’re going to think I’m some weirdo fetishist. “Here, look at my cat’s butt. Look at it. Take my money, but look at her butt.”

Vet: That is one healthy cat butt.

Me: Okay then, thank you. We’ll ummm…be back next week with our other cat. His butt is fine I mean, I assume it’s fine. I’ll ask my son.

Because that sounds less weird. 

So, Gertie was traumatized for absolutely nothing and I paid double the vet bill.

I told Joey he was going to be that parent who had his kid in the emergency room every other day.

I am glad he didn’t inquire as to how often I took him to the doctor or hospital. To be fair to my son, if he does do that, then he comes by it honestly.

But Gertie wasn’t the only one who had to make an unexpected trip to the doctor.

I have reached the age where I can injure myself by sleeping. Or breathing.

You guys, I hurt my upper back bad. Either the injury was so horrific I blocked it, or I hurt myself while sleeping. I called my doctor last Monday for a video appointment. He prescribed some drugs and sent me to the hospital for an x-ray.

The trip to the hospital was no fun. There wasn’t a position I could get in to that gave me relief. Getting the x-rays was no better. At one point, I had to take my mask off  and open my mouth as wide as I could so that she could get a good shot of the vertebrae in my neck. Which seems odd to me. I think she was just fucking with me.

Anyway, the official diagnosis was a pinched nerve. I’m feeling much better now, but those first few days were rough.

When we got back from the hospital, Gertie jumped up on the bed with me. Gertie is my scaredy cat, and it’s always nice when she comes to visit. She let me pet her a little before settling down on a pillow. I told her all about my back and how much it hurt.

Gertie has a naturally melancholy face, but in that moment, she seemed a little extra pensive.

She seemed to say “Unless they stuck their finger in your butt? I don’t want to hear about it.”

Randy and I were discussing celebrity chefs and I was reminded of a family reunion.

Our baby boy, Joey will be 23 on April Fool’s day.

When he was 2, we attended a family reunion on Randy’s side of the family. There were dozens and dozens of people there, so you know, it was my personal hell.

Holy shit, you guys, the only thing I hate more than large gatherings is my yearly lady parts exam. Which I haven’t scheduled yet. I’m 6 months behind. 

Anyway, we were at this family reunion and Joey happened upon a cousin who was very nearly the same age as he was. My baby boy lit up and he ran over to this little human who was about the same size as him.

What happened is his cousin immediately balled up his little toddler fists and knocked my son on his ass.

I watched this happen and even though my heart had been broken a hundred times before, it broke again. Joey wasn’t hurt. He fell on to the ground, but honestly, he was still in diapers, he was already close to the ground. But still, I watched a little bit of his innocence die in that moment. I watched his face go from a big fat smile, to shock and a little fear.

It broke my heart, but there was another part of me, an older and more practical part of me that thought, “and thus starts the lesson.”

There’s a point to this, I promise.

So, Randy and I were talking about Gordon Ramsey. We’ve watched many of his cooking shows over the years.

This evening, Randy watched a clip of his and made a decision.

Randy: I’m not watching Gordon Ramsey anymore. He’s a dick.

Me: That’s fair.

Randy: Seriously, he treats people like shit. He’s an abuser.

I thought about this. And I thought about people like me. People who can take a punch.

We wear this like a badge of honor. Life may have not been easy, but we’ve proven ourselves. Abuse us, misuse us, but we keep coming back. We can take a punch.

But should we be able to? I mean, really?

I’m not saying that we aren’t due the strength we get from injury, we are due that strength. I’m not saying that we all don’t need to learn how to deal with difficult people. There will always be difficult people. But there is a very wide line between knowing how to deal with the occasional jerk and knowing how to take a punch.

I’m saying that so much of pain could be avoided. I think Randy is right to no longer give his attention to people who are famous mostly for being abusive dicks.

So many of us take this abusive behavior and we pat ourselves on the back for being tough enough to take a punch.

But really, shouldn’t we all be reacting the same way Joey did the first time he got knocked on his ass? We shouldn’t get used to being treated badly.

I know this is oversimplifying everything.

I just think we should be nicer to each other.

On the other hand, we really need to learn to take less shit.

And fuck Gordon Ramsey, he’s an abusive twat.

A night without internet started like this. Something happened that was pretty cool.

It stemmed from a mundane act, something that happens every evening.

We feed the cats wet food every evening around 5:00.

We have to feed them in separate rooms because Alfie is an asshole and chases Gertie away from her food. So, Alfie eats his dinner in the same spot every night and Gertie eats in whatever room she is in at the time, as long as it’s not the kitchen where Alfie eats.

Anyway, this evening, about an hour after the cats were fed, Joey joined Randy and I in our room to watch Youtube videos. Randy asked if Gertie had been fed and Joey said he didn’t know. I told them her food was up in Joey’s room.

At the exact same time, Randy and Joey both said “Oh, is it?”

You guys, they didn’t just say the same thing at the same time. They said precisely the same thing at the same time. The same inflection, the same little hiccup of a pause between the “Oh” and the “Is”. They sounded exactly the same, except the voices. The voices are quite different.

It occurred to me that if I heard them same the same phrase independently of each other, that it wouldn’t have been apparent how they sound literally exactly the same, if by “literally” we agree that voices don’t count.

I was fascinated to learn how much Joey and Randy truly sound alike.

Their laughs are not even close to the same. Randy hardly laughs out loud and Joey laughs a bit like a hyena. But even though they laugh completely different, they very often laugh at the same things. Honestly, I’d say less than half is actually funny, but I am neither Randy nor Joey. So.

After they spoke at the same time, they looked at each other and Randy might have made the smallest of chuckles and Joey cackled.

I told them “Randy, you should be amused and proud. And Joey, you should be concerned.”

Neither one of them laughed.

I really do worry about their sense of humor.

Okay, so now we’re going to switch to a different story. I have no segue.

Friday night, the unthinkable happened. A night without internet.

We were in the middle of Skyping with Mountain girl and The Bass player. The call ended absurdly early.

Randy, Joey and I sort of stared at each other for a bit. We came to the realization that we had no mode of entertainment.

No movies, no music, no social media. Nothing.

We haven’t watched DVDs in 10 years. We never even hooked up a DVD player in this house.

Joey and I decided, after a few rounds of drinks, we would scour the basement and garage for a DVD player and some DVDs.

We’ve been here two and half years and we still have half a basement worth of boxes to unpack. If I’m honest, some of them had never been unpacked from the previous move and we were in that house for 10 years.

We never found the DVD player, even though I’m reasonably sure we own at least a dozen of them. Or at least 2.

I did, however, after searching through dozens of boxes that were obviously packed by a crazy person, find a single DVD. It was a single DVD from a Futurama set.

Okay then. Futurama it is! We would huddle around the TV in the living room like the goddamn Ingalls and watch a handful of episodes of Futurama.

Only we never did find a DVD player, but Joey had a plan. The PlayStation. We’d play the DVD on his PlayStation that he hasn’t used in forever. We had to find double A batteries for the controller, but we prevailed.

So, it turns out you have to download something from the internet to play DVDs on the PlayStation.

And we couldn’t get it to play on the laptops.

We were forced to sit together and talk.

It wasn’t all bad, really. I told Joey an amusing anecdote about a time I babysat 5 little boys when I was 12 and how one of them ended up in a dryer. The awesome thing is, he didn’t roll his eyes and say “Yeah, I’ve heard that story a thousand times.” He actually laughed.

No worries, the kid in the dryer was fine. I mean, a little dizzy, but fine.

Edited to add: OMG, yes…we DO read books in this house. All the time. But it was late. We had some drinks. And I just found the situation absurd, so I wrote about it. Just heading off anymore comments about whether or not we read.