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Personalized Solutions in an Impersonal World

You’ve erred, Mark.

Here are the broad strokes of my just-completed day:

8:46 am: Woke up in bed next to two chicks. “I don’t remember either of your names,” I said immediately and without instigation. Their blonde hair looked dyed, but whatever, it’s close enough.

There were three other dudes in the bed too, but whatever, it’s 2015.

8:49 am: Placed a phone call. (We’ll come back to this.)

8:52 am: Hot cocoa. Lots of Bosco.

8:55 am: Walked out onto my balcony. Saw another chick in a Celica backing out of my driveway but she looked sub-9 so I assume she was just making a U-ey from the road.

9:01 am: Started a game of Tetris. Dropped down a few blocks just right. Put down the Game Boy. Didn’t pause it.

9:03 am: Breakfast: banana bread in bed.

9:17 am: Picked up Game Boy, on which my Tetris level had reached 22. Continued playing until level 67.

11:00 am: Ran marathon. The event that the city sanctioned and plotted was a half-marathon, so when I got to the finish line I doubled back to the start line to finish the job proper because I’m not a pussy. There was shoving and shouting and confusion.

11:55 am: Lunch: The specials board at Domino’s was scant so I settled for a plain medium pie.

1:05 pm: Called Dad to tell him I love him. Mom picked up so I had to wait ‘til she handed over the phone.

2:00 pm: Treadmill for a little bit. My buddy Terrence Dell, M.D. runs a sperm bank downtown, and he lets me use his personal gym in the basement of the facility on the condition that I stand out front afterwards looking spent and sweaty in order to attract passing female foot traffic.

6:30 pm: Dinner and many drinks at a local dive. Sandra Bullock was there and I got her number.

10:15 pm: After descending back down to around 0.08 (give or take a measly tenth), I decided to do some Uber-driving to make some extra cash before turning in. I’ve arranged a kickback scheme with the bouncer in which he confiscates the keys of patrons that are unable to prove their sobriety by reciting the alphabet in QWERTY order. Business is booming.

2:12 am: Solved a problem (yours).

2:45 am: Sandra reneged, so I rang Salma, aka “Olé Reliable.”

Does that sound like a sick man’s itinerary? Of course not. But it was a sick day; one that I’d prudently chambered. That phone call, at 8:49 am? Me calling the bossman to make it official. I’m not good at faking infirmity, so I pulled up a YouTube vid of a moment of silence so the bossman would hear those inevitable coughs from people who would’ve best been taken out in the tragedy being commemorated. Bossman bought it.

I get it. It sucks being sick. You know what also sucks? Work. Might as well make those miserable hours coincident.  If I wake up sick, and go to work, there’s no drop-off in happiness because I’ve already cratered. If I wake up swell, and go to work, I start to lament foregone joy and contemplate all sorts of –icides. This latter scenario is what sick days were specifically invented to mitigate, despite the “sick day” moniker. Sick days are for debauched excursions of chasin’ tail and postin’ bail, not for wondering which digestive tract terminus your bodily expulsions are more imminently likely to exit so you can center the appropriate orifice above the loo.

The sick days you’ve already used this week may be lost for good, but I’ll put a call in to your supervisor to see if we can get them reinstated. I’ll offer to buy some Starz. Today though, you obviously need to get your ass to work to stop the bleeding. No excuse, not even bleeding, will sway my advice. Just last week, I came down with a cardiac condition that resulted in my heart’s beats resembling the opening drum salvo of “Hot For Teacher,” an analogy that the doctor stated to a very concerned me as he examined my chest with the stethoscope. Despite this, I swallowed an Advil and stumbled to my cubicle. I defibrillated myself several times before lunch. It was fun to yell “clear” and then do it.

But by this morning my aorta had corrected itself, and I had in my possession a sick day that a lesser man might have disposed of. I felt good, and continued to feel good, even between the customarily dreary hours of 9 and 5. And when my final days have passed and are tallied, I will have experienced that one more joyful day uninterrupted by both obligations of employment and discomfort of illness, while you, unless you power through and go to work today, will soon wake on an odd Tuesday in July that you have an inkling could be great, but you’ll never know, and will wonder on your deathbed how that Tuesday could have gone down had you called in “sick” and not spent it in a Comcast field office.