I'm hopeful today, no matter how goofy it gets (and I'm hoping to attend a candidates' forum for candidates for state representative and state senate tonight), it will be a little less scattered than I was yesterday. I really am a creature of habit so much so that the slightest alteration in a routine can throw me for a loop and yesterday morning gave me an inadvertent opportunity to try my Jerry Lewis impersonation without waiting for Labor Day.
Not sure why Monday mornings seem to constitute a surprise attack for me to the depth and degree that they do, but it happens all the time. I try most Sunday evenings before turning in to get all the stuff I do on auto-pilot assembled and pre-staged so I don't have to do a lot of thinking (or better yet, ANY at all, until I'm out of the house). It's all pretty simple stuff, which is only fair since I'm simple as well.
I've gotten into an almost routine about working out at the gym around the corner from where I work every morning after I arrive in my office. Sometimes it's the treadmill, sometimes it's the elevated indoor track or the recumbent bicycle (no relation to the Hamptons' DNA, I've been told). Viva le Variete! More or less.
Yesterday I'd only just gone around the block when I realized I'd forgotten an outer coat to wear during the day. Not that big a deal as I squared the block, pulled into our driveway, let myself in through the front door and retrieved my jacket and was gone with the wind, if the wind were now a fifty-eight year old doddering idiot. Oh Rhett! Yes, Scarlett. Of course, your mileage may vary, wildly.
Back on track I sped to work, ready to head to the Jamesnasium (I don't know it well enough to be informal, yet) and discovered I'd forgotten a large towel for use after my shower (you only think you know where this is going? HA!). Much like the jacket I'd forgotten and then retrieved, the towel is an item I only use every day of the work week, so it's understandable how I might have lost sight of having one.
One of the pleasant memories I have with my late father was helping him on one of the innumerable IP (idiot projects-I came up with that all by myself) he had, hanging rain gutters from the eaves of one of our family's summer houses. Of course, we were attempting to do this in the rain-why else would he want to put them up? Dad was a brilliant man with no mechanical aptitude (I take after him except for the brilliance) who not only knew everything, he knew everything better, including how to hang rain gutters without reading any of the instructions. We had so many hangers, and wires and bolts it looked like a hardware store had exploded. I can still hear his words, 'anyone can follow instructions; a genius improvises.'
If that's true, I should've called the Mensa society because I was channeling Einstein. It came to me like a flash-just because I had forgotten my towel didn't mean I needed to forgo my apres-workout shower. Thank goodness, the locker room hadn't gone to those electric hand driers! It still had those large rolls of brown paper towels, one grade less severe than sandpaper I think, and I unrolled YARDS of the stuff (Christo would have been envious since my shoes matched the color of the paper), hopped into the shower, lathered, rinsed, repeated and jumped back out.
Of course, jumped was also what some of the other guys in the locker room were doing, very much underwhelmed by my improvisational aptitude. I don't think there had been this much hub-bub with a shower since Bobby Ewing. I never let on that anything was out of the ordinary-just me and my Bounty Buddy, the quicker-picker-upper. And yes, since you're asking as my wife did when I told her about this, it definitely works. Just not indefinitely. Sure hope I have a second set of trousers in my desk drawer since I can't shake the feeling I forgot something again this morning. Two Mondays in a row. Some guys have all the luck.
-bill kenny
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