ROBOCALL

I want a medal because I woke up wanting to tell my wife I think she gets more beautiful every day but didn’t because commenting on her appearance makes her self-conscious. During the night, something bit me on the backside and now I have to rub cortisone on a quarter-sized welt on my left cheek. I had a dream that I was looking over a precipice into a room filled with water and I wanted to jump but was hesitant, which was good because it turned out the room wasn’t actually filled with water: a tub in a nearby room had overflowed and it was only a puddle, which disappointed me, so I got a bucket and by god I was gonna fill up that room with water, at least until my wife asked me to stop because the floors were stained bad enough as they were. Also, while I was asleep, five police officers were shot and killed by a sniper who died when police blew him up with a bomb-deploying robot. According to the Mirror, sex robots may be the biggest tech trend of 2016. I’d rather think about sex bots than death bots, though there’s something disturbing about the guy from that Men’s Health article I read who has a human-sized doll he screws, and whose vagina he likes to remove and then “walk around with.” The father of a kid on my son’s soccer team—a professor of robotics, a guy from Rome—shouts words of encouragement for his son in Italian and addresses the boy as “Pizzolino”; when one of us finally asked what it meant, he said, sheepishly, “little penis.” The landline rang today and like an insane person expecting a different result, I answered it, and once again, it was the automated guy who begins every call with the exclamation “Seniors!” which made me wonder: does he call because I have a landline or because I’m over forty—and does one of those explain why I get so much mail from AARP? The women I’ve befriended in the last five or so years whose company I enjoy the most—an editor, a retired schoolteacher, a retired professor of religion, and a retired Sunday School teacher—are all over the age of sixty-five, which makes me wonder: am I old or just looking for a mother figure? My father called from Yellowstone to tell me about two discoveries: one, whenever he made a squeak by blowing air through his tightly pressed lips, female mule deer came running, and two, he’d read an article about how the THC in marijuana could reverse memory loss, which made him inquire about whether or not I might have any connections. I suggested that he pay Colorado a visit. What I forgot to say, and what I would’ve said, if I’d thought he was serious: if you find anything good, save some for me.