Jed Wolf

Johnny coats make me feel sorry for myself. I can camp in the woods, be vulnerable in the presence of strangers and cordial while naked at swimming holes but I can’t “make nice” with anesthesiologists. I’m used to dealing with most situations, neighbors, clients and check out lines with the charm and dexterity of an Anole, but hospitals trap me.

I was ashamed at how morose I became before being put under for the ultrasound procedure today, but my mood upon awakening was abominable. The only reason I uttered words in the recovery room was so they might release me. On the way home, Dave asked me if I wanted to stop at a nursery to purchase an overpriced plant and I declined.

It wasn’t feeling sorry for myself because I’ll be using an eye patch for the rest of my life, or from the faint sulfur smell clinging to me from the hospital, or the Johnny coat which revealed my scaly tail, it was my urge to burn.

My father smelled similarly in his last decade. His skin lesions and hematomas were repellent – his stoic, impenetrable countenance, unsurprising. When I leaned in to kiss either of my parents’ warm, mottled foreheads in their last years, they smelled of sulphur and worse.

Though I forgave them many times for being human, and myself nearly daily lately, today I relived all my resentments on the car-ride home. Cleaning them, feeding her, perfunctorily referring to them as “dad” and “mom” and telling jokes at their bedsides during their last years made me well up. Indulging in self pity while passing up a $60 mango tree made me feel young again.

As a kid, I refused what other kids would leap for and sat in my room for unholy hours in protest. Home from the hospital, I went immediately to this room without a word, lay down and revisited my sullen youth. “The only reason either of you come in here is to yell,” I remembered yelling after days of brooding elicited yelling from them.

My childhood room was den where I learned to breath fire. I set myself ablaze a few times trying to get my parents to react. I mostly deny the urge to ignite as an adult, but lately concerned with my health, it’s been tempting. I let Dave have it last evening for being insensitive and continued to smolder this morning at the hospital. Like a giant sleeping Disney dragon with one eye opened, I’m easily triggered by the insensitivity of nice people raised in normal homes. Most of the time my rage aims inward but not always with loved ones.

I’ve been known to flare up from my seat in front of cable news and from inside my car at throngs of people like myself seeking paradise but today, during the car ride home from the hospital, I thoroughly torched my inner child. I’ve vowed to be kind to myself countless times, yet woozy from anesthesia, when I got home I flopped on my bed and rotisseried the brat.

I blamed the polliwog, the puddle I was born into and the dragon I became. I blamed my parents and theirs, the human race and anyone suggesting we be grateful while our world is desiccating. I loathed the dramatic coverage of the Surfside condo collapse and deliberate ignorance of its true cause. It was over 90° at the arctic circle yesterday. I had it with the impotent mantra “they know not what they do,” which served me during the Trump years and was proven utterly wrong and now it’s too late… Men are free to lie and laws designed to be broken while all I can do is sizzle and drip in my own juices all afternoon, so I called my sister.

Her son is temporarilly living in an apartment under their house but rarely leaves. He’s not severely depressed and has interests but is reluctant pursue them and do what’s required to become a cog in the wheel of this world, and who can blame him. “It’s an incredibly difficult time to be young and sensitive,” my sister says. She knows better than to blindly offer advice, platitudes or career paths because of her fears for him in a world she has no solutions for.

Whatever our age, surely we can still escape into what’s left of nature, get elected, become artists, engineers, gardeners, writers, activists, successful, addicted, apathetic, depressed or suicidal?

We’d like to feel part of solutions and less guilty about our influence on the planet. We want to vote for decency. We’d love if it were enough to simply be kind to ourselves and the ones we love without appeasing too many difficult people. We’d choose if we could to remain unperplexed because, though there’s no resin worldwide to make any more fiberglass swimming pools, at least there’s toilet paper.

“If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,

your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”

– Icelandic Proverb