| BY ZAN BOCKES |
| I wake up at 6:17 this morning. At 6:29 yesterday and 7:02 the day before, according to my calendar. I write 6:17 at the top of my “To Do” list. If I don’t keep track of the times I wake up, I might not wake up at all. Which makes me nervous. Okay. The List: 1) Stretch. 2) Get dressed. 3) Eat breakfast. Apple. 4) Write. Work on that 400-word essay on obsession-compulsive disorder for my psychology class. Am I one of those? I like to make lists, count things, time things, rearrange words, check stuff off my list...From the word “compulsion” I can make (I’ll set my stopwatch)--on, sin, son, up, sum, coin, clump, lump, slump, slip, spin, plus, pus...there must be more...anyway, 13 words in 21 seconds. Wait--cus...is that a word? |
| 5) Bank. Deposit $48 check from my mom for my 48th birthday, which means I’ll have enough for groceries. It takes 13 minutes to walk to the bank, past my favorite house with the eight concrete deer in the yard. Where are my keys? Coat pocket. 6) Get groceries. Coffee, bread, oatmeal, apples, bean and bacon soup, goldfish crackers... From “groceries” I can make: is, cries, rise, rice, rose, core, gore, sore, sire, seer, goes...eleven words, 17 seconds. Where are my keys? Coat pocket. The thought of not making a list scares me. I’d be so totally lost! I’d forget to do something, like eat or breathe, and then I’d die a horrible death... 7) Write obituary. Ha, not really. Can’t think about that. I’ll shout “Nothing!” in my mind so I won’t have to think about it. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Which is No Thing at all. Not even a word. But it is a word. How can we have a word for something that doesn’t exist? 8) Call that shrink at the Mental Health Center. Maybe he can tell me why I’m so nervous all the time. Will he diagnose me “anal retentive?” Does that have a hyphen? Where are my keys? Coat pocket. Okay. Time to get moving. Stretch. Ten exercises, 15 seconds per pose. Check. Get Dressed. Jeans. Blue T-shirt. Tennies with purple laces. Check. Eat breakfast. Fifteen chews per bite of apple. Check. Write. Four hundred words on that compulsion essay....Check. |
| Zan Bockes is a direct descendant of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and revelry. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Writers and Their Notebooks, Kaleidoscope, Out of Our, Cutbank and Phantasmagoria, and she has had four nominations for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection of poetry, Caught in Passing, is available from Turning Point Books. She lives with her husband in a funky house in Missoula, Montana, and works as a Residential Sanitation Specialist for her own housecleaning business. |
