Worry, worry, worry? Screw it

David Sherman

Man, there’s so much shit to worry about. I don’t know where to begin. A free Alberta? I probably should’ve been worried about that. But I wasn’t. Been to Calgary once. Not overly impressed. If they had gone, I would’ve waved bye bye.

I guess I should be worrying about the U.S. but I’m sick of reading about it, hearing about it, talking about it. Been colouring my life since the good ol’ days of Vietnam and now you-know-who so enough. Now it’s school shootings. Shooters are getting taken out before the cops can get there by pistol-packing G. I. Joe citizens.

Where’s that book I’m reading?

There’s vaccine skepticism. Price of oil. Price of diesel. Price of food. Higher cost of everything. Thursday or Sunday when I shop, I used to fill up. Now I hunt sales, reimagine leftovers. Screw ‘em. That means Thursdays and Sundays I’m free to worry about something else.

Fancy dinners in the heart of the fancy town down the highway cost more than I paid for a four-bedroom in Montreal’s Mile End when I was in my 20s. Big enough for a boarding house. Now I imagine it would be Airbnb. Instead of $140/month it’s probably $5,000 a month. Something else that’s supposed to piss me off. Not today. I’ve reserved Wednesday noon for price-fueled, blood-pressure spikes.

And France is on fire. Cities are burning. People are fed up. Europe usually cooks under a heat dome in summer. The climate is literally gone to hell -- rising seas, flooding everything, warming oceans, warming air, melting ice. Tuesday and Saturday mornings are reserved for climate-disaster fears.

Let’s not forget the Middle East. Everybody’s killing everybody. And of course, there is Ukraine and Russia. Never knew there were so many drones. Especially lethal drones. And if I did a Google dive into wars, I’d find people are blowing each other up in a dozen or more places, including Haiti.

Would need a new nervous system.

There’s hunger and homeless everywhere. We give a box of chickens to the food bank. Give a little to the Chabad house. Give a little to Doctors without Borders. There’s no end to those in need. There’s an hour or two a day to brood about that.

And, of course, there’s stuff that really matters. The World Series. NHL hockey. NBA basketball. NFL football. Have to worry about winners and losers. Injuries, slumps, screw-ups. Have to exalt the winners, vilify the losers and the owners, who never lose no matter who wins. They have the fans, baited and hooked, in their pockets, cleaned out by ticket prices or cable and streaming costs that piss me right off.

That’s usually saved for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturday nights but Hockey Night in Canada on Saturdays are no more so one could rant about streaming and cable and, now, Prime, showing a chunk of games.

To catch all the games, sports junkies need to spend as much a year as a heroin addict to catch all they’d like to.

NFL owners make anywhere from $7-$30 million a game in profit. Latest jackpot is to pull out thousands of seats and replace them with luxury executive boxes which sell for multiples of what a seat sells for. And, bonus, none of the executive box revenue has to be shared with the league. But, only have to lose hair over that a few times a week and football is not on my radar.

I’m supposed to be really freaked about AI but I’m not. My intelligence is legitimate, albeit limited, and I’m powerless to stop the powerful, both human and microchip variety. I’ll go count leaves.

Closer to home, have to put new snow tires on my old car. Have to put new snow tires on Reisa's car. Live in a small town in the mountains you need two cars. That’s a few thousand right there. Need new glasses. Eyes are worn from bearing witness to a deteriorating planet. That was another thousand. Actually $1300.

It’s hard enough worrying about the price of rice without having to worry about the entire rest of the world. I spent a lot of my professional life in the newspaper business. I was a professional worrier. Not only did I get gas reading the news, I had to worry about editing it and where to put it on a page and write a headline for it and worry about what the bosses were gonna think about it. Worry about what the readers were gonna think about it.

Sometimes I’d write stories. Wonder what editors and readers would think about it. I’m still writing things. Still worrying about what readers are gonna think about.

Of course, we have friends and family to worry about. We are of that age. People are getting sick. People are having surgery. People are dying. We make food, make calls, visits. Not completely useless. No day on the calendar reserved for that.

And I worry about my partner. I have to make sure she’s healthy and happy. Don’t even know how to make myself healthy and happy. Those are midnight thoughts.

So where am I supposed to find the time for all this worry and what else I’m supposed to worry about? I don’t really have a lot of control over what goes on in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, Iran. Hard enough to have control of what goes on in my own home. Our own street, our own town. And that’s not even talking about the damn squirrels gorging on the birdseed, eating through the feeder. Does live and let live include squirrels, chipmunks, ground hogs, voles, mice?

Is the result of the Alberta referendum more important than whether the birds fatten themselves up for winter?

It’s hard to know what to do about anything. Can’t do anything about most things. It’s part age, it’s part that the world looks like a pegboard – fragile, pressed fibre -- a dyke with too many holes, not enough fingers.

It’s part of the reason they invented professional sports. Close your eyes to the hundred-million-dollar salaries, the billion-dollar price of franchises, and games take your mind off reality. How tough a year can an athlete have when he’s making $6-$60 million sitting on the bench?

So, once you scanned, on whatever gadget you scan, the miseries of the world, you still have a few hours of the week when you could lose yourself in sports and all the things you should be worrying about.

Or, take a deep breath, cause, in reality, you can’t do a damn thing about anything. Best to read a book. Or bake a cake. What’s a few calories?