I have a lousy sense of direction. This means that my instincts about how to get from Point A to Point B are so rarely correct as to be essentially useless, much like the recommendations of economists. Sometimes I feel that I'm going the right way, which is usually a sign that I'm dangerously off track. Other times I experience sudden anxiety that I've missed an exit, or taken the wrong one, and this anxiety has caused me to make many ruinously bad decisions. In the more innocent era before all the gadgets and gizmos moved in with us, it wasn't uncommon for me to make a driving mistake that caused me to be enormously late in meeting whichever human had unwisely expected me to meet them at some godforsaken outpost. Perhaps the best way I can illustrate my map-averse mental condition is to reveal that it was only a few years back that I was finally, and none too charitably, disabused of my long-held notion that Maryland was situated to the south of Virginia.
These days, I rely most of the time on GPS, which is of course also imperfect. Old band mates of mine may recall our first long-ago GPS experience, where we were told to take a left turn that would have had us driving straight into a mountain, to an almost certain death. We saw that as an amusing anomaly until later when we were trying to find a realtor's office to drop off some keys, and what should have been a quick errand slowly turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare. I actually recall saying out loud that if we were in fact where the GPS said we were, there probably wouldn't be a burro standing right next to our rental car.
Sometimes I use a synthesis of electronic and human advice, as when I'm driving my father to one of the 27 weekly doctor appointments required to keep his state-of-the-art cyborg exoskeleton functioning at the federally mandated levels. (Thanks, Obama.) In these situations, I depend on both GPS, and the more old-school version, DBS. This feature, which comes standard, basically involves my dad telling me we should have taken Gallows Road.
Gallows Road, I should explain, performs two functions. When we are running late due to my skipping breakfast in order to get to his apartment early enough to watch him getting ready in a leisurely and relaxed manner, my dad will offer Gallows Road as a better choice than whatever exit I took, or didn't take. If we are on one of those dull stretches of highway where GPS and DBS are in brief agreement, my dad will wonder aloud about the mysterious origins of Gallows Road's name. "There doesn't seem to be any record of any gallows being used around here, as far as I can tell," he often says to me. His exhaustive researches into this topic are similar to my son's tireless efforts to find out if he has any homework due on a given day, or in a given year.
Recent medical appointments have mostly involved a bifurcated regimen of penile bleeding and grim-faced nurses lecturing me for not reminding my dad to bring his hearing aids; many of my readers will probably picture that as more amusing than it actually is, but today's events were less predictable and involved more of me thinking on my feet. A string of frustrating setbacks involving the filling out of endless forms and a Diogenes-like quest for a parking space eroded my usual bottomless reserves of patience and good feeling toward my fellow man, and at one point I found myself on an elevator, unheroically fantasizing about the barely ambulatory old bag to my right tripping over her own useless feet and knocking over the delivery guy's cart of diet sodas. That would have been sweet! Just now, following a tete-a-tete with not one but two grouchy secretaries, a confrontation with a Russian nurse who wouldn't get out of my way until I told her exactly why my dad needed a chest x-ray, and one of life's many opportunities to ponder why Americans can vote, but can't execute a K-turn, I've wound up in the fourth or fifth doctor's office of the day, staring at the wall and its reproduction of Claude Monet's "Parisians Enjoying the Park Monceau." Fuck Monet, and fuck his Parisians, and fuck the Park Monceau. I'd like to cram their damnable gooseberry glacès down their smug French throats. The bastards!
After all this, I look away from my father for a millisecond, allowing him to disappear into thin air like a volunteer in a magician's stage act. One of the reasons for all the appointments is that modern science has been studying my father's inexplicably shifting physiognomy; in any scenario where I need him to stay put, he has access to the reflexes and speed of a cat on hot bricks, while paradoxically, if I'm about to get a parking ticket, or if we're impeding the progress of paramedics, he suddenly develops the reflexes and speed of a Georgia congressman.
As I was finally dropping my dad off at his last appointment (he's the keynote speaker at some benighted luncheon), I told him I'd email him about the multiple additional appointments his doctor just ordered, and he said, "That'll work. Or, you could just email me."
All of this should help explain why, when I finally had the chance to skim an article in the Guardian about a TV personality and camera crew who were forced to run from a Hindu mystic who was aggressively and cryptically flinging his own shit at them, my reaction was envy.
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