In Retrospect, A Strange Day
By Ryan Oakley. Filed in Uncategorized |Tags: Uncategorized
My morning routine, which actually takes place in the afternoon, is usually rock solid. I wake up and have coffee and a smoke in front of the computer. I look at email.
But I’m not quite ready to answer. Mainly I’m just deleting the bullshit. (Invites, sales pitches, your last email etc.) Then I have another smoke and more coffee.
Sometimes I blog something, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I reply to emails, sometimes I don’t. After I’m done doing or not doing all that, I perform my toilet.
Freshly cleaned, I return upstairs to get dressed.
When I come back down I either fuck around on the computer until I go to work or I get undressed and prepare for my pre-chore nap.
But today all of that went crazy, Shalome is training to be a personal support worker and needed someone to practise her chops on. She was to bathe, shave and dress me.
This, of course, sounds great. Who wouldn’t want to be bathed, shaved and dressed by a buxom young lass? And all I needed to do was act old and grumpy. Believe me, I can do that. Particularly in the morning. It all sounded great. Porn mythic, even.
pic nicked from here
I was laying in bed, getting a “bed-bath” and complaining like a motherfucker, shouting “YOU’RE HURTING ME! YOU’RE HURTING ME! YOU’RE HURTING ME!”, making demented demands and practising the grab-ass that will serve me so well in my autumn years, when I realized something: It’s not all that much fun.
While it’s quite enjoyable to be pampered, it must be quite awful to be cared for. Shalome was good at it. That doesn’t really matter. I felt like a giant, skinny baby. Although you can be assured that, when I’m old, I’ll be molesting every nurse that passes into grabbing distance, the situation was quite unsexy.
Once again, I feel like porn has lied to me.
pic nicked from here
For starters, Shalome is not Asian. I was told that’s important. And she’s not even going to be a nurse. She’s going to be a personal support worker. Porn is full of crazy lies. It just makes unsexy things sexy. Like pizza delivery. Or gang-rape.
Having thought about it, I don’t suppose the experience is meant to be sexy. At all. Maybe that’s why Shalome called me Mr. Oakley. That just reminds me of my mom. And that makes me think of sexy again. Then again, so do most things.
So, you see, I’m confused.
At any rate, my behaviour set the cat to howling.
This was odd. Not only is she quite passive and quiet, I never knew she cared. But when she saw me flopping around on the floor, pretending to have a seizure (my own little improvisation) she must have realized her supply of tuna juice was in danger and, as a result, grew quite upset. She made noises I don’t often hear her make.
I guess that watching Shalome carry me to the bathroom, while I knocked my pyjama pants down about my ankles and shouted about the woman in the next room (my beleaguered roommate) was more than my sweet little kitty could handle.
That cat is really upset with me right now.
And the whole incident has done nothing to help the already troubled relationship between Shalome and my cat. Jealousy is so ugly.
In the bathroom, Shalome shaved me, then returned me to the couch and proceeded to dress me. A three piece bespoke suit may not be the best thing for this sort of practise. It is not, after all, what most people wear. But that’s what I planned on wearing today so there it was. Besides, when I get old, that’s what I want to wear. It will make my advances on the nurses seem charming instead of what they truly are: The depraved actions of a desperate and morphine-addled lecher.
It must be quite awful to have other people dress you. I did not like it. For starters it took quite a long time. This time could be better spent trying on different ties and socks. When I get old, I’ll certainly need to have outfits preplanned right down to the last detail. Otherwise my poor personal care worker will be spending all her time tying things around my neck. And I can guess where that will lead.
pic nicked from here
I guess we all learned something today. I learned that being old is going to be awful and Shalome learned what happens when you give me an inch. Next thing you know, I’m faking a seizure with my pants around my ankles while my cat is howling.
Valuable lessons.
Although Ryan Oakley began his career as a simple rake (drunk) he has since become Toronto’s most renowned flaneur (no car) and notorious dandy (overdresses). A misanthropic composer of psycho-geographical fictions (bad science fiction), he is also a server of food, a tender of bar and a washer of dishes. While performing all these functions with efficiency and elegance (disdain and malice), he somehow finds the time to publicly criticize friends, strangers and cultural crap. He's a bit of a dick.
