I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow

by Jonathan Goldstein

  “Canned peaches,” I imagine her saying. “Use a fork.”

  Medium Is the Message

  (18 weeks)

  TUESDAY.

  I’m on the phone with Tony.

  “Ever feel slightly off?” he asks. “But only slightly. Like your T-shirt’s on backwards or something.”

  “I often wear my T-shirts backwards on purpose,” I say. “It makes me feel like with each step I’m travelling back into the past. Ah, the past! That’s where regrets are born.”

  “Plus with the tag in front, you can dip your head under the collar and contemplate your own mediumness.”

  “Speaking of being medium,” I say, “I recently read that in experiments involving cockroaches and aggression, it turns out that aggressiveness is a quality most valuable in medium-sized cockroaches. Evidently, this is because they have the most to lose.”

  “What can a cockroach possibly have to lose?” he asks.

  At this, we conclude our conversation. Having achieved a difficult Zen koan, what is there left to say?

  WEDNESDAY.

  Howard calls up to see if I want to go out for seafood.

  “One of my goals this year is to eat more lobster,” he says. “And wait until you see me in a lobster bib. It’s a very handsome, slimming look.Well worth your paying for dinner just to behold me in it.”

  “When you were ten,” I ask, “did you ever think you’d one day be in your thirties hustling lobster?”

  “If, at ten, I’d gone to a palm reader who told me I’d one day be living in a cardboard box, subsisting on gobstoppers, and able to watch The Twilight Zone five days a week on cable, I’d think the future was looking pretty good.”

  “Can we blame our public school education for breeding in us such lowered expectations?” I ask. “Maybe we’d have made more of ourselves if we were home schooled.”

  “Depends which home the schooling was taking place in,” he says. “In my home, our encyclopedias were used to prop up windows. My dad kept the whole set in a cardboard box in the garage beside his tool box.”

  “How does fish and chips sound?” I ask.

  “Pretty good,” he says.

  Never underestimate the power of medium expectations.

  As Elusive as a Peach Slice

  (17 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  I’m sitting on the couch playing video games with Tucker. As he plays, he tells me about a conversation he had in a bar the night before with a woman who was taller than him.

  “It’s not that I’m short,” Tucker told her. “It’s just that I’m far away.”

  It’s my turn to play, and Tucker watches the screen.

  “Even as a Pac-Man, your personality really comes across,” he says. “The way you run away from things while still pausing to look back.”

  “I guess I always try to make time for regret,” I say. “I wonder if the ghosts are Pac-Men who’ve died in games past.”

  He hands me another beer. The more I drink, the less afraid I become of getting caught by ghosts, but the more attractive a nap starts to feel. In sleep things are simpler.

  No regret over the past. No worry for the future. Only the present. And as bad as a dream gets, at least you get to sleep through it.

  MONDAY.

  In the dream, I am able to fly. I haven’t had a dream like this since I was a kid.The only problem is that I’m only able to fly half a foot above the ground. Also, I can only fly about a quarter of a mile an hour. Still, I am flying. I head to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, but after several minutes of tedious, unspectacular flight, I decide that it’d be faster just to take the metro.With this thought, I am suddenly awake.

  FRIDAY.

  After a large, tasty Chinese meal, I lean back and decide to just enjoy the moment.

  “What’s the matter?” Tony asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Why?”

  “You suddenly look like Charles Manson trying to remember where he parked.”

  “I was trying to be in the moment,” I say, angrily and no longer in the moment. “This is why I can’t relax—because whenever I do, I end up looking like an antisocial lunatic.”

  When I’m finished my whining, I realize I’m still hungry. I’ve been trying to watch myself, and so I debate whether to top things off with a fortune cookie.

  “You just ate three egg rolls and a family-sized plate of General Tao chicken,” Tony says. “Go for gold.”

  I crack it open and read the fortune. “Spoil yourself a little.”

  And so I decide to eat half. And as I continue to eat the other half, I’m not exactly in the moment, but somewhere adjacent to it.

  Timing

  (16 weeks)

  SUNDAY, 10:30 A.M.

  Marie-Claude calls to invite me over for dinner. A five o’clock dinner.

  “What’re you, on Honolulu time?”

  “It’s called having children,” she says.

  “Are your children in their seventies? Eating dinner this early takes planning—lead time. I need to retool my whole digestive clock. I’d have been getting up at 4:00 a.m. for the past two weeks if I’d known.”

  “Go out and paint a fence,” she says.“Work up a healthy appetite.”

  “When was the last time you heard someone tell a grown man to ‘work up a healthy appetite’? In this day and age, it’s just not done!”

  1:30 P.M.

  In an attempt to work up a healthy appetite, I nap on the couch while watching TV. Boxing is on and it’s making me nostalgic. As a child I watched the sport with my father while punching the couch cushions. I was a cocky kid and thought that if Muhammad Ali agreed to fight me on his knees, I might have a chance.

  I wanted my father to think of me as a hero of some kind. Little did I know that, as far as he was concerned, my single greatest act of heroism would only arrive in my thirties, upon losing my wallet in a Chicago taxicab and continuing to lead a relatively normal life.

  “You handled that courageously,” he’d repeat whenever the story arose. “After something like that, they’d have had to put me away for good.”

  During a commercial, I head to the kitchen and stare at a shelf full of cereal boxes, uncertain as to whether I should be having lunch or a pre-dinner snack. Cereal as a snack means throwing in marshmallows, while cereal for lunch means slicing in a pear.

  If the early dinner was a sporting event, I guess this would be like some kind of warm-up.

  5:30 P.M.

  After dinner, I sit on Marie-Claude’s couch, depressed. So much of my time is spent thinking about what I’m going to eat next that, with dinner behind me so early in the evening, I’ve nothing left to look forward to.

  7:30 P.M.

  At home, I try to calculate how much of my day is taken up with thoughts of food. If you were to break down my thoughts on a pie chart (and what other chart could possibly be more suited to the task?) it would look like this: 30 percent on what my next meal will be; 10 percent on who’ll show up at my funeral; 10 percent on sexual fantasies; 20 percent on revenge fantasies; 15 percent on what I should’ve said to various security guards and receptionists in verbal altercations from decades past; and 10 percent on hair loss. This leaves me with 5 percent for contemplating the “big picture” stuff like what movies I’m going to see next.

  9:15 P.M.

  Against all probability, I find myself heroically peckish. Perhaps there is an upside to eating early, after all: looking forward to your second dinner.

  I decide to go out for a sub and, as usual, I order the twelve-incher. My intention is always the same: to eat half and save the other half for tomorrow’s lunch. But I always blow it by eating the whole thing. I know that if I can just wait ten minutes after that first six inches, I can pull it off. But they are a very hard ten minutes.

  I attempt to ride them out by looking away from the sandwich and out the window of the restaurant. I ruminate on sandwiches past: the time I bit my tongue while eating a meatball sub; the open-faced tun
a salad sandwich I once sat on at a shiva house.

  After five minutes of these reminiscences, I look down at the last half, pick it up, and bite into it. I feel that somehow, over the course of my life, I’ve earned it, and, as always, it proves just as good as the first.

  Stuff

  (15 weeks)

  WEDNESDAY.

  After weeks of searching, it’s now only a few days until moving day, and I’ve decided to spend the afternoon packing—though by “packing” I mean deliberating over what to pack and what to leave behind.

  Like my parents, my inclination is to save. I’ve even decided to store an ex-girlfriend’s mother’s social work master’s thesis archived on 5¼-inch floppy disks. The thesis somehow made its way into my possession, and so I continue to feel a responsibility for it.

  Likewise, after schlepping around War and Peace from apartment to apartment for twenty years without making any headway with it, I still can’t bring myself to toss it. No matter how unlikely, it’s still possible that one day I might conquer it. As the psychotherapist Irvin Yalom writes, death is the impossibility of possibility. And so holding on to the book feels like a vote in favour of all that’s still possible.

  I look out my apartment window and see that the box of books and clothing I left out there with a “free” sign remains untouched. I feel like my erudition and fashion sense have been roundly rejected—albeit by complete strangers.

  “I am not my books and I am not my clothes,” I tell myself as I draw the curtains closed, pull the curtains off the wall, and pack them into a box. I place the box on the curb and watch them get passed over by strangers.

  “If I’m not my curtains,” I think anxiously, “then what in the world am I?”

  A few moments later, the doorbell rings. It’s Tucker.

  “I literally can’t give away my belongings,” I say, staring out the uncurtained window. “No one’s even taking my red checkered shirt, the one you said made me look like a picnic table. Just think, if you took it you could lie down on the floor while wearing it and eat a bowl of potato salad off your chest, the whole meal feeling al fresco.”

  “What’s the sense in moving this?” he asks, pulling out an almost empty bottle of single malt scotch.

  “It’s got about two shots left,” I say, “and I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

  “I got news for you,” he says, uncorking the bottle, “that occasion has come.”

  Tucker swigs some scotch, hands it back to me, and offers to run down to the store and pick up some cigars.

  In the silence after his exit, I survey my place, taking in all the boxes containing my belongings. It occurs to me that life isn’t just about the accumulation and curating of stuff. It’s also about letting stuff go.

  FRIDAY.

  Today at the CBC, I notice they’ve created a new, well-lit display case for the Oscar an employee won for best animated short in 1982. I recently learned that there’s an old Hollywood legend that if you touch an Oscar, you’ll never win an Oscar. I wonder if the employee who put it in the case knew this and whether he felt conflicted.

  “You’re forty-five,” he might have said to himself, “and you’ve yet to discover any latent cinematic talent; still, to pick up the trophy means relinquishing all childish hope.”

  At a certain point, adulthood becomes a numbers game. Odds are you’re never going win an Oscar, bowl a perfect game, finish War and Peace, or, in most cases, even learn how to drive if you haven’t already learned by the age of eighteen. At thirty-nine, I’m beginning to see that middle age might mean having more failures behind you than triumphs ahead. So you might as well just polish the other guy’s trophy and put it in the display case.The lucky ones have a scotch bottle with a couple shots left for when they get home.

  Inbetweenness

  (14 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  I’ve just finished moving all my stuff into the new apartment, and deciding where to put certain personal effects is proving difficult.Where to place the empty box of Reese’s Pieces that contains a doodle I’m rather fond of ? In my old apartment, it just sat under the couch. Or what to do with the sunglass lenses that, years earlier, became detached from their frames—frames I’m still hopeful will one day resurface?

  But I am enjoying the feeling of inbetweenness—that not-yet-being-settled feeling—and I plan on dragging it out as long as I can, because it’s a state of grace where all things are permissible. For instance, this evening I ate takeout pizza off a cardboard box while drinking wine from a soup pot (like a cowboy!), and I watched the TV on the floor beside me, inches from my face (like being at the drive-in!).

  I think I may have stumbled upon a new school of interior design.

  TUESDAY.

  Marie-Claude and her daughters babysat Howard’s pugs, Desmond and Bruce, over the weekend. Marie-Claude calls up to let me know how it went.

  “The girls want Bruce to be their godfather,” she says.

  “But I’m their godfather,” I say.

  “Lucky for you it isn’t an electable position.”

  “A godfather’s job is to supply moral tutelage,” I say, defensively.

  “Bruce licks their feet,” she says.

  Not to lose the upper hand, I offer to pick up the girls for lunch. What taking a nine- and seven-year-old out for hamburgers lacks in the laughing-at-your-jokes department is more than made up for in the leaving-youplenty-of-leftovers-to-eat department.

  After a hardy meal, I drop them back home and, after kissing them goodbye, press a small gift into their hands.

  “A sunglass monocle,” I say, “for each of you.”

  WEDNESDAY.

  Tony knocks on my door, wanting me to join him for souvlaki. I tell him I’ve too much to get done in my new place. I show him the to-do list.

  “You deserve a break,” he says, looking it over. “You’ve got half your items ticked off.”

  “Yes,” I say, “but vacuuming, dusting—I did those things before making the list. I only wrote them down for the pleasure of ticking them off.”

  Sometimes I write down “do the dishes” as “wash cups, wash cutlery, wash plates” just for the extra ticks.

  “Give me that list,” Tony says. He pulls out his pen, writes something down, and hands it back to me.

  Eat souvlaki.

  Who can argue with a written commandment? I grab my coat and get ready to eat souvlaki. It will prove the most satisfying tick of the day.

  THURSDAY.

  I wake up out of a dream in which Tucker makes a cameo as a raisin in my porridge.

  “What business is it of yours to dream about me?” he asks when I call up to tell him about it.

  “I have no control over what I dream,” I say. “And why would you care anyway?”

  “I’ve had occasion to glimpse the things that go on in your mind,” he says, “so the idea of spending any time there is upsetting.”

  I change the subject by asking if he’d like my inflatable Bozo punching bag. It’s one of those dolls that, when you hit it, it pops right back up; but since I never got around to filling the base with sand, whenever I punch it, it stays down.

  “I had one of those when I was a kid,” Tucker says. “Playing with it helped nurture my budding sense of futility.”

  He agrees to take it, believing the defective version that stays down might give him the sense of accomplishment he’s always craved. I ask if perhaps coming over and helping unpack my boxes might also afford him a sense of accomplishment, but he declines.

  The truth is, I’m pretty happy to keep living out of boxes anyway. The opportunity to live like a hobo in your own home doesn’t come along that often, so it might be nice to stretch it out for a couple more days. Maybe a week. A month, tops.

  Perfect Imperfection

  (13 weeks)

  MONDAY.

  In the midst of showering, I realize I’ve been using the same bar of soap for about a month now. From this I conclude that I
am either a) in the midst of a Hanukkah-type miracle; or b) simply not scrubbing hard enough. There have been many failures in my life. Now I can add “showering” to the portfolio.

  I grind the soap into my flesh with vigour—to try and catch up. I am working towards something far greater than mere cleanliness. I am rubbing out an opponent. This is some serious Old Man and the Sea kind of stuff.

  “You have been a worthy adversary, but annihilate you I must.”

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, I emerge from the shower. I am late for work, shrivelled like a raisin, but feeling triumphant.

  TUESDAY.

  I buy a new couch for my new place. My mother is insistent that I get arm covers for it.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “You’d be surprised by how quickly arms can rub out,” she says.

  “How quickly?” I ask.

  “Well, it takes twenty, thirty years,” she says, “but it happens, and when it does, you’ll be sorry.”

  “I won’t be sorry,” I say.“I’ll feel a sense of accomplishment.” By way of explanation, I tell her about the bar of soap from the day before and how grinding it into nothingness through determination and perseverance was very rewarding.

  “Who taught me how to shower anyway?” I ask. “Because I don’t think I’ve been doing it right.”

  My mother looks at me, glassy-eyed.

  Persian rug makers are said to leave in one mistake on purpose. In this way, they can look upon their creation and be reminded that all things made by man are imperfect.Yet this is what makes their work more valuable than if it had been made by machine. Persian rugs bespeak their maker’s humanity just as my imperfections bespeak my mother’s humanity. Hers is an extreme humanity, for if I were a carpet, I would be possessed of more than one mistake. I would be a knotted, unravelling carpet full of cigarette burns and grape juice stains.