Six

Here’s the definitive signpost for middle-age: When you find yourself using your long-handled vibrating massager for its publicly advertised purpose—to work the kinks out of your back and neck—you have passed the point of no return.

At the moment, I don’t even care. I spent the last two hours digging through purses, tote bags, coat pockets, piles of bills and half-used notebooks, trying to find a damn ticket. Several months ago—okay six but do we really need to count?—a ridiculously cheery, polite cop alerted me to the fact that my car registration had expired. The friendly shout-out came in the form of a $72 ticket. At the time, I had a choice, renew my registration or pay the ticket. I couldn’t afford to do both. So, the ticket went to the island of misfit documents. Out of sight, out of mind. Now the state is communicating with me, in a decidedly non-cheery manner, telling me that I have a week to pay the freaking ticket or lose my driver’s license. This is exactly the sort of thing that, in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, catapults the heroine into a potentially-murderous chain of events, all of which
could have been avoided by a simple timely act. Now I’ve got to find the ticket, pay the ticket in person at a Clerk of Court office, then take the receipt to a DMV office because god-forbid that the state should have a mechanism for alerting the DMV that the ticket has been paid.

Searching for the errant ticket, then imagining a trip to not one, but two low-level government offices—where I envision clerks either filing data or filing their nails while a mass of humanity fidgets and sweats and tries to get comfortable on hard, single-cheek plastic chairs—has sent me in search of an out-of-date bottle of Xanax. And the long-handled vibrator.