Dance to the beat of the rhythm of the night

When your dad is in the hospital (bronchial infection/COPD complications, not flu, not pneumonia, almost certainly coming home tomorrow) and while you’re visiting him this afternoon the nurse blows out a vein doing a saline push and after you go home for a while and come back to visit him tonight the hospital finally sends an A-Team nurse to tap a vein and when the nurse comes in the room he kind of takes your breath away because he looks like the deceptively wholesome college football player who answers the doorbell to find the boyishly innocent pizza delivery guy standing boyishly innocently there on that really hot day in that one movie and where was I oh yeah so this super-hunky nurse comes in with an actual ultrasound machine that he uses to virtually spelunk your dad’s arm for a heretofore uncharted vein and he taps it on the first try like a boss and then he works into the conversation that he and his wife have popped out four kids in rapid succession so you’re pretty sure he won’t be ordering any pizza from you if you know what I mean and after he leaves you hang out with your dad and mom for a bit and since you have no friends or pretty much no life or interests to occupy your time you go to the gym all by yourself on a Saturday night all by yourself on a Saturday night dear god what kind of loser goes to the gym all by himself on a Saturday night but the two benefits of going to the gym all by yourself on a Saturday night are there’s nobody there to take your weights or Judgey McJudgerson judge you if you take a couple gym selfies and let’s not kid ourselves here of course you’re going to take a couple gym selfies and also you don’t have to be embarrassed when you track in a bit of slush that melts on the gym floor but the downside is there’s nobody in charge there who can change the crappy music that’s that mix of rap and R&B where effete pre-teens with bilateral lisps mumble mostly incoherently about girls being fine over sloppily mixed samples of public-domain El DeBarge elevator music tracks which is as motivating as the already-used-by-you-but-then-casually-refolded-by-the-waiter cloth napkin you find at your table when you come back from your second trip to the buffet but you still manage to rise above those buzzkill challenges and have such a brutal arm workout that you’re almost obligated to take those gym selfies to commemorate the evening but let’s still not kid ourselves you were going to take those gym selfies anyway so you do and then you head right to your Blogger app to post the two that make your arms look the biggest and your waist look the smallest because you can’t decide and you desperately don’t want to let go of the delusion that you look like you’re 38 even though you’re going to be 50 in two months the end and I don’t mean the-end-you’re-going-to-fade-into-irrelevance-and-die-because-you’re-turning-50 I just mean the end of this brief story. The end.