I'm sorry, I missed the Life is Complicated Memo

There is a miniature Wal-Mart in what should be my dining room right now.

Every evening I come in the back door, from the garage which will shortly become a breezeway if I don't do something about the front and back doors soon. I sort through the mail,-bills and I seem to have overspent my lawyer's retainer by six dollars, payment due upon receipt-and then sneak through the trash heap that I will one day dine in just so I can beeline it to the bedroom and hide in the closet from the things.

Not awful things. Not concoctions of Stephen King's imagination brewed slowly for weeks in my paranoid crock pot. No, rather pedestrian things. Stuff I have bought over the last week. Stuff that just for all the coaxing in the world won't jump out of its box and put itself together and program itself and make itself available to me for my dining and dancing pleasure.

No, this shit is going to sit in its box until I take it out, read the freaking directions, put it together and teach myself a whole new technology. All new shit that I don't want to learn, take the pop quiz on, graduate with a 3.65 in and want to remember past last week anyway.

But I don't have a choice.

Do I??

My friend laughs at this. That's bittersweet. In doing so, she lights up a room. In doing so, she reminds me that nothing is fucking easy anymore. Want TV? Hoss, used to be you hauled an Admiral 21 inch black and white up the apartment steps, plugged the sucker in, fiddled with the rabbit ears and looka that, WMTW in Portland comes in just fine. The Steckino's ad is running again.

Now you've gotta pull the fucker from its box because nothing over 24 inches is coming home in a Volkswagen. So you ditch the box in the Best Buy parking lot, lug the thing up three stairs and proceed to re-connect Spock's brain. How many plugs will fit on the back of this thing??? Answer, all of them. I am convinced that if I shoot a line into every cable receptacle on the back of this mother, Charlie Gibson and I will be having morning coffee together on line while he blogs his Burundi Journal. Is Diane Sawyer still on the air? Couldn't we just play footsies while her camera guy sprints down the block for fresh Cinnabons?

Meanwhile, back in the appliance aisle of my dining room, a programmable coffee maker and a brushed steel toaster oven are awaiting birthing with all the associated tearing of plastic and discarding of styrofoam bumper pads that we could reduce the national traffic fatality number with if we taped these to Cooter's head and sent him home after the Grandview Dirt Trials.

I just don't want to face it. I want coffee, I don't want to push buttons until midnight so that a fresh pot is awaiting me at 4.59 am on December 6th, 2041.

I want toast but I don't want to associate cooking levels with my preference for toast which is really just a stack of white soaked in 10W-30 the way you used to get them at any HoJo's with the Big Egg Morning Riser Special (more coffee Hon, or can you hold out until 2041?)

I want my calls answered but it takes me four days to pull the new Motorola Handsfree out of the box, plug it in, charge it and sixteen charged hours later go back to the set up instructions only to find that the thing isn't an answering machine at all. You looked too closely at the box art and convinced yourself that the green light on the base that lit up next to the words "voice mail" meant more than "you're using the thing right now asshole. See the nice green light that's on?"

Back to sensory overload world to return the thing. Did you want to return the extended service plan too? Instead of one free service visit per year, we'll send a fourteen year old to your house annually to exclaim: "Dude, can't you tell a phone at all?"

Diagram this sentence you little puke!