Seeking out Godot

Monday morning I started a list on a small post-it note. It's still in my wallet today. I never know when I might need it, but it's more important than money right now to me. It was actually just a memo-pad note. No adhesive. Small things. I'm always hung up on the small things. It befouls the big picture...

On my list are three columns: The first contains the names of those I know and love; the second confirms me being the most impatient person they have ever met; and the third contains the name(s) of any suggested contenders to the title of "least patient person in your world." I'll say this: The second column has a hell of a lot of check marks. It looks like it might stay that way for a while...

I already had Susan on the list, and I didn't directly ask her if I was the least patient person she'd known. It was fairly assumed, I think. She didn't offer anyone else that she knew to exhibit less patience, at least at that moment in time. So she's there, and I'm checked. A young woman I'm chasing like a jackrabbit in heat is also on the list. I'm number two there. I don't understand it, and I haven't met this uncle fellow of hers, but I hope we're both disarmed when we do meet. It should be interesting. I don't have the patience or time to track him down right now, and I'll jump to the assumption that maybe this young lady simply doesn't know me well enough yet...we'll see. She knows I'm damned impatient, though. She repeatedly brings it to my full attention.

The next person I contacted is an individual in whom I occasionally seek some counsel on how to live a more effective life. He's unpaid, and I think he gets something of a kick out of hearing from me. I've tried the paid counselor thing, and I've been kicked out of every form of counseling that I know to exist. I've been kicked out of thirty-day treatment facilities, individual counseling sessions, group counseling sessions, online counseling sessions...I could go on and on, I'm sure there are more types of counseling from which I could face eviction, but at some point I had to throw my arms in the air and give up on the thing. Most of them hadn't helped one bit anyway...

Anyway, I told the gentleman that I'd come to this realization about myself, and I wondered if he'd encountered anyone with less patience than myself. He'd be likely to have run into someone, somewhere that might have the affliction a bit worse than me. His answer, after I'd droned on and on about this particular hangup was: "Not right now." So he's been added to the list, and the second column has been checked.

So I go to work, and I do a little tiling for a kitchen I've been remodeling. Here's the irony of the whole patience issue: I'm surrounded by the most patient people in the world. I don't know if it's because I've worn them down over the years of my abusive existence, or if it's God's peculiar way of pointing out my defects by example, but it is most certainly the case. Perhaps I couldn't handle being around anyone for any period of time if they were struck with the impatience as severely as I. The homeowner in this example has been patient to a fault--I've had an illness I've had to fight through, and I've been snowed in twice since I started to rip the kitchen to shreds. No complaints. Only compliments. It's a helluva deal...

But I do my work, and I've got maybe a couple of hours left on the job. A little grout, a little touch-up--it's done. One more trip. Completed projects are the best. I've got so many incomplete projects in my life...that will require a completely different post, but it is a quite substantial list. All I need right now...another goddamned list.

I drive home from KC, and as usual, I'm literal hell on wheels. The truck is fully loaded with crap from the job, and I drove like I had a fire to put out somewhere. I just hate the fact that I'll never get back the time spent in that vehicle...there has to be something more to life than transit... My brother had contacted me on the way, and he wanted to come by and do some laundry and watch the K-State/Texas basketball game. That was okay with me, because I had no plans to do anything else. I very rarely have plans to do anything than that which is most necessary or most recently suggested to me. I don't have the patience to "make plans." More to a fault, I've discovered I don't have a strong acumen for tracking the few plans I bother to make. I found myself doubly booked for Saturday due to personal indifference. Oh, well...it's good to be in some demand, I suppose...

I'd suggested I might make some dinner, but I didn't even hit State Line Road before I knew it wasn't going to happen, and I told Travis we'd have to do pizza, or something similar. He was on board, and when I got home I went ahead and ordered up Pizza Hut. I normally wouldn't do such a damned fool thing, but they were offering $10 any pizza, and I ordered a couple. I wish that had gone more smoothly.

I live on the edge of a small town. Baldwin City, Kansas is home to maybe 4,000 people. There is a small liberal-arts university here. It's a nice little town. If I could find anyplace better to live, I'd probably be there by now. My family is here. My best friends are here. And I'm too neurotic to completely start over in a different place right now. I know quite a few of my limitations. Starting a new life in a new geographic location could swing wildly one of two ways--there is little doubt about this in my mind. I don't want to see what might happen if it's on the bad swing of the pendulum.

So here I sit on the edge of this small town. I'm surrounded on three sides by the city limits. These people, to be sure, are within the "map" on the wall of Pizza Hut bounding the delivery area. My home is quite certainly a point of demarcation on this slice of cartography. What I do not have is a city address. It's a rural address. I need to make up a city address, and post it on the mailbox, but that's probably some sort of federal offense, or I'd quit getting the mail, or I don't know what would happen, but it would likely be bad. But I've been on hold for a while with the Pizza Hut girl, and she comes back to explain that they don't deliver to my address.

"Do you deliver to XXX Lawrence Street?" I asked.

Another pause, and she returns. "Yes, we do. Would you like the pizzas delivered there?" she asked.

"No, I don't," I replied. It was my next door neighbor's address. "Do you deliver to YYY Lawrence Street?" I then asked. It was the address of my next-door neighbor to the south.

Another pause, and she returns, "Yes, we do. Would you like the pizzas delivered there?" she asked again.

"No, I don't. I want the pizzas delivered to the house that separates those two addresses."

Another pause, this one much longer than the others, and she returns: "I'm sorry, my manager says we don't deliver to that address."

What I should have done, or maybe I'm glad that I didn't, was to get the manager on the phone. I'd probably already solidly increased my chances that some high school punk was going to jack off all over my pizzas, and I didn't want them to spit all over it to add insult to the injury. So I took my lumps, and kept the order placed as a pick-up.

I duped my brother into picking up the pizzas anyway, so I effectively transferred that minor inconvenience. What happened when the pizza arrived was yet another example of astounding impatience. Keep in mind that all this has happened after my realization of my own Achilles' Heel. He shows up with three pizzas, not the two that I ordered. I made sure he wasn't taken by the Hut, and it turns out they just messed up, and either didn't know what to do with the extra pizza, or didn't know they messed up, or something. Anyway, we have three pizzas where we should have two.

I hadn't eaten anything but toast early that morning. So it had been something like 14 hours since I'd taken on anything but some peanuts. I tore through the pizza like it was my last meal. I realized at the time it must have looked silly, but I just kept going at it. My brother was finishing his third slice of pizza, when he put down the crust, looked at me, and asked, "How many slices of pizza is that?"

"I don't know," I lied. "Maybe eight." It was exactly eight. I had no reason to lie, as my brother is good enough at subtraction to determine if I was deceiving him. Three is a prime number very easily tracked and mentally tagged. Three was also an exponential power of some other prime number determining the exact number of pieces of pizza I had eaten in maybe ten minutes. It must have looked a little disgusting. So I'm a glutton in addition to all my other deficiencies of character...The thing is, I wasn't even hungry, and I probably would have gone back to eat more pizza had he not stopped me by asking me that question. Just because I felt like I was ripping off an inept Pizza Hut. Total madness.

So the game starts up, and we're bullshitting through the start of the first half. I explained to Travis what I was trying to do, and what Susan had suggested as something of an outlet of discovery. I then asked him what I'd been asking everyone else: Was I the worst he'd known concerning the patience question?

"Well...you're right there," he said.

"With whom?" I asked. This is where I find that pauses, if they are to exist, are most likely to happen.

After the pause, he mentioned a person with whom we'd worked a few construction jobs. I noted that he many pressures in his life to which I have no subjection. Travis conceded this was most certainly the case, and when I pointed out that he had to deal with that wife of his simultaneously, a consensus was reached among us that he indeed had more patience than myself. I'd have kicked that daffy skirt to the curb five minutes after finishing the first go...poor fella...he probably feels the same way in retrospect...

But Travis had to concede that he had no solid evidence that I'd ever shown any tangible level of consistent patience in my life, and he had plenty of funny stories to back them up. Poor guy. I guess he's seen more than most...but we finally started watching the basketball game, and we were both very impressed with the Wildcats of K-State.

Their coach, Frank Martin, is one hell of a contradiction. Looking at him, I can tell he lacks patience. But he almost never blows up at the refs. He blows up on those players all the time, but they seem to love him. They play their asses off for that guy. He is, in my opinion, one of the five best coaches in the college game right now. He is a fantastic fit for that university, even though I am a Jayhawk through and through. I absolutely love what he's doing over there. Maybe it's that I can relate to the cauldron you can see in the guy--he always looks like he's just on the edge of doing something remarkably stupid, but it seems that he always tilts it just enough toward doing something profound instead. He's just right there on the edge--a hell of a lot like me--and in the end, even though I was too impatient to stay awake the entire game, Frank's Kats beat the hated Horns, and all was right in the state of Kansas when I awakened. Sometimes impatience is an asset?