The Long, Slow Fadeout

I went to my shrink this morning. I go every six months. He never knows who I am.

I enter his office and sit opposite him with his ginormous desk piled high with paperwork between us. “How have you been?” he always asks.

“About the same,” I always reply. He studies the results of the MMPI that I took when I first visited him. After that, the conversation runs something like this:

Shrink: “Your main problem is OCD.”
Me: “I don’t have OCD.”
Shrink: “According to your MMPI you do.”
Me: “And the MMPI can’t be wrong.”
Shrink: “It can be, but …” He studies the test results again. “You did answer several questions wrong …“

That was an odd thing for him to say. The MMPI test has 567 multiple choice questions. The questions are about “you”, such as, “Do you drink too much alcohol at least once a week?” If someone asks you a question about yourself, and you answer as truthfully as you can, how can the answer be wrong?

“What’s your favorite color.”
”Blue.”
”That answer is incorrect.”
”Uh … what?”

Color me puzzled.

Shrink: “You don’t rehash things over and over in your head?”
Me: “What kind of things? My PSA is high and it causes me to sometimes worry about whether I have prostate cancer. Is that OCD? Isn’t it normal to worry about some things?”

I look around his office. One wall is decorated with many official looking documents, each in a small, black frame. One of them declares his membership in some organization devoted to the study of OCD. I guess it’s true: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The doctor wants to give me a prescription for an OCD pill and becomes frustrated when I tell him I don’t need or want an OCD pill.

“Then why are you here?” he asks. I explain that I’m here so when the pharmacy calls to renew the prescription for the med he’s already got me on, he’ll know who I am. But as I speak the words I know they’re b.s. This guy never knows who I am.

I tell him I don’t need a prescription this time because I have enough refills to last six months. He ignores me and performs some incorrect math on his fingers, after which he decides I need a refill, and he writes it out and hands it to me.

“See you in September,” I tell him.
”September,” he says in agreement.
”I hope things go well for you until then.”
”Likewise.”

I leave, knowing that when I return in September he won’t know who I am. He’ll look at his little MMPI printout, and he will tell me I have OCD and try to get me to take a pill for it. He always does.

The grocery store is on my way home so I stop and pick up a half dozen meal items. When I get home I unpack the bag and discover an ice cold bottle of Dasani. I don’t buy bottled water, so where did the Dasani come from? Did I pay for it? I look at the receipt. Nope, the Dasani is not listed. I suspect the lady who was directly ahead of me in the checkout queue is, right about now, discovering she doesn’t have her Dasani.

I have a leaky roof and I’ve spoken with Jesús several times about it. Jesús re-shingled the roof, thus causing the leak. I called him last Thursday and he said he would come to my house the next day at 1 PM. At 2 PM the next day I called him and he said he would be at my house at 3. At 4:45 I called him and got no answer. I finally got him to my house on Saturday. He inspected the roof and assured me he would return on Monday, if not sooner, to repair the leak. I reminded him that the forecast called for rain Monday night and Tuesday and stressed the importance of fixing the leak before my ceiling was completely ruined. He promised to return on Sunday or Monday. Now it’s Thursday and I’ve heard nothing from him. So I call him.

“Jesús, this is Wayne. The last time we talked you said you were going to come by on Monday to fix my roof. Did you come by Monday?”

Long silence. Then Jesús says, “Who is this?”

It’s just a part of the long, slow fadeout. First you become invisible; waiters, waitresses and store clerks can’t see you. Then, after a few more years, you become conveniently forgettable. Oh, you may be young now, but the long, slow fadeout – it’s waiting for you.