Ramblings

When I was in high school I worked at a grocery store with this big, kind of fat, and completely bald guy. His name was Roy.

He was a nice guy, but he was also clearly a little burned out and sometimes had trouble making complete sentences. He said something once about spending most of the 1980s sniffing glue. All that glue had made him a little forgetful, and one time he left the back door open and a raccoon got into the store and ate a couple of dozen boxes of Kashi.

Most of that glue was sniffed on a beach in California where he was bodybuilder and surfer. He claimed to have dated Miss California 1983, or something like that, one summer in 1985. A friend of his told him that she had a crush on him, so he stopped what he was doing—quitting the job he was working at the time so he could leave his shift—just so he could find her and ask her out. She said yes and they began dating. The best three weeks of his life followed.

He told me this story at least once per week (again, all that glue) and it always reached the same inevitable and sad conclusion.

“And then, one day,” he would say, and this is when he would start to get serious and stop smiling, “she dumped me.” After he said that he would always kind of space out for a minute or two. Was it the pain of heartbreak, or just all the glue that had gotten absorbed into his brain over the course of a decade? I never really found out.

I had a physiology professor in college who would always list the symptoms of a disease and compare it to love, which in his opinion was the worst disease of them all.

“Suppose, class, that a patient presents himself at your office,” he was always using this expression, “presents himself,” which I think is a very doctorly way of speaking. “The patient has nausea, shortness of breath, cold extremities, dizziness and difficulty concentrating. Either this patient is displaying the early stages of kidney failure, or perhaps he is in love. Further tests would be needed.”

Well, anyway, I eventually stopped working at that grocery store and I haven’t seen Roy since. I hope he’s moved on.

I think being high on glue probably has similar symptoms to kidney failure…78,389 out of 100,000.