Halfway up my top twenty list of modern convenience accoutrements is the overlarge toothpaste cap. The smooth kind you hold like a tennis ball and dial like a stereo knob. That dull, inaudible, tactile pop it makes, like a mute person’s morning handshake. The ease of motion, that perfect grip. Mouthing how are you?
Other caps, they don’t care if you’re comfortable or satisfied, nor do they look out for your safety or longterm health. Grip and unscrew and good luck, they say. Pinch and crank and don’t forget to wash your hands. There’s some puss or frosty mold oozing from that tube nipple and it’s gluing itself to my ineffectual grooves.
The overlarge cap, meanwhile, says, I’ll be with you when you’re arthritic. I’ll take care of you and keep your fingers clean.
This list it’s on, it changes every week. Reorders like an AP poll, and stuff you’ve never heard of sneaks in sometimes at eighteen or twenty. I don’t check it often, but when I do, that cap, that reliable cap is always on it, somewhere between nine and thirteen.
My fiancée doesn’t like lists. She feels the pressure of be all, if not end all. I’ve tried to push the casual drinking game on her. Maybe pastime is more accurate. What are your top five movies? Four actors you’d like to see audition for the role of you. Two books you wouldn’t mind reading aloud on a road trip to Portland. Plane trip to Indiana? Three songs that might comfort you if you came to in the middle of a surgery, unable to move or communicate in any way.
What might comfort me is making a list.
She doesn’t bite, though. Maybe because the questions are always so hypothetical and absurd.
I create many of the lists in sobriety, duly absurd, that I once created drunk. Best Lakewood bars at ten a.m., for instance. Gas station attendants who eye me with the least suspicion when I purchase beer at six a.m. on the dot. Top five first drinks on a day like today.
That last one’s special. I know my old go-tos in any weather better today than I knew them then. I’d be my drunk self’s best bartender. Let’s play.
Today, I’d follow champagne and bitters with two mezcal Negronis and a bartender’s choice double reposado. I’d sign the check without looking at it, after a quick fernet, and go home to read some Beckett and take a nap. Half cup of coffee on waking up listening to the rain, with four flavors of hard seltzer in the fridge, chilling for act two of this exquisite day-drunk.
When second place is toothpaste and coffee you don’t quite feel like sobriety is worth it.
todd of tacoma 