If it looks like I’m troubled, it’s because my giant hook hand has grown large enough now to palm my head like a basketball.

But wait, there’s more…

The Officious Wombats at the Board of Health have gone and shut down the Dunkin Donuts at the all night gas station around the corner from my flat, and it seems another pointless exercise in bureaucratic ball-scratching, if you’re asking me. If anyone were concerned in the slightest about health they wouldn’t be buying breakfast and beverages at a gas station, would they? Quite the opposite really. We do it because we really don’t give anything resembling a fuck. We give just enough of a fuck, most times anyway, not to light a cigarette next to the gas pumps, but even that can be a stretch from what I’ve witnessed (or experienced personally). They should limit their policing to places that are actually meant to serve food and drink, and save their time and energy on the corners where we’ve lost all hope. Or maybe just have a special F rating for gas stations, car washes and other such places that stay open all night and fulfill other functions. The rating can stand for fucks, as in, if you don’t give a fuck, then we have zero fucks to give. Carry on and be at peace.

Their unwanted advances into my realm forced me to wander into theirs’ like a lost coyote foraging in places it doesn’t technically belong. It was, in this case, a Dunkin Donuts in Park Slope, where people generally give far too many fucks about things that don’t have any impact on their lives. Like, why are you in a Dunkin Donuts at 8am lecturing someone who only speaks Tamil or Hindi about why their chain should give up lids and straws. Keep holding up my first coffee of the day and you will be extinct sooner than a sea turtle, I promise you. And why are you ordering a soy latte in a Dunkin Donuts anywhere on the planet, AND being concerned about the consistency of the foam? Oh, because this is Park Slope.

And you’re a cunt.

Carry on.

I get my giant bucket of iced coffee. Light milk. Light on the ice, though I didn’t ask for light on the ice. One sugar. Did I order it that way? More or less. Am I arguing? No, because I’m just smart enough to know that the woman taking my order speaks about as much English as I speak Tamil. What I get is good enough.

And I’m not a cunt.

I sit down and settle into my caffeination process. A desiccated blonde in what looks like bed clothes, yoga pants and a huge men’s t-shirt, asks if she can share my table. Knock yourself out darling. Within 10 minutes I know this much:

She spent the night in the hospital with her daughter in law who has recently been diagnosed with MS but is suffering from a stomach virus, so they took her (the daughter in law) in and hydrated her intravenously (three bags) and sent her home.

MS can go into remission. (Okay, I knew that already.)

She (the blonde) is in recovery after a pesky opioid and benzo addiction that started in the 70s and 80s at Studio 54 and the Palladium with booze and blow. She went clubbing every night back then and dressed as a Playboy bunny with ears and a tail. (Lordy!). She’s been clean a few years even if it may not look it because she was up all night.

She’s locked out of her son’s apartment because she broke the key off in the lock.

She’s still married and likes her husband all the time but only loves him sometimes, and only goes to church with him a couple times a year because he’s a nice guy. She’s a lapsed Catholic and believes that it’s more important to like your spouse than to love him. (Okay, I’ll buy that but it would disappoint me, honestly.)

Her sisters moved to North Carolina to escape New York but she could never go because she’s a real New Yorker at heart and doesn’t dislike black people like they do.

Her daughter is beautiful and is a designer and was a real handful growing up. The son was easy and in fact so easy for the first four years of his life that she and her husband figured they could have another. Big mistake apparently.

And at some point she may have continued on, but I was full to the brim. There was just way too much information for me, with or without coffee. I drifted into more relevant thought, like why my hand appears so huge in the selfie I had taken when I first sat down. It’s ridiculously large, and looks crooked and deformed. It looks as large as my head, which is really rather large…

I’ve probably shared too much.

But the Board of Health could have saved themselves and me as well a lot of grief had they only been polite enough to ask.