I spent most of my 20s at Denny’s.

I lived the majority of my 20s like it was the bonus level of one of those arcade hunting games*. I never expected to make it that far, so rather than executing any kind of plan, I just randomly shot as many turkeys as I could. Whatever I could catch was—as the name implies—a bonus.

I started my 30s back in May and while I’ve still got about 9 and a half years to turn them into a disaster, they seem to be going well so far. Maybe I assume every other decade is an actual level.

I did kind of stumble into them though. I spent the last week of my 20s housesitting for my mother, which turned out to be a little weird. It was different when my mom lived in a house that I had lived in at one point; that makes it feel like coming home. Now that she’s moved to a different location, it kind of just feels like I’m digging through my mom’s stuff. Still, housesitting is nice because it adds a subtle sense of purpose to all the time I spend sitting on my ass.

Because I would be alone in a quiet, isolated environment, I decided I was going to use that time to unleash my creative energies. In practice, I spent most of my time listening to live versions of Ghost’s cover of “Here Comes the Sun” on YouTube. It turns out that driving to and sleeping in a different house takes a lot out of me.

If you adjust your definition of “creative” to include “trying different varieties of peanut butter”, you could say the week was a success. However, if your definition of “success” means “actually accomplished something”, I didn’t do too well. But I had one task that I absolutely needed to accomplish that week: renewing my driver’s license.

I will do anything to avoid going to the DMV, up to and including putting off going to the DMV until tomorrow. However, I also don’t like to wake up early, as I have to work from 6pm-2am and I end up limping over that finish line if I wake up any time earlier than 2pm. This presented a problem. I could go to the DMV, which was right down the street, but who knows how long I’d have to wait. Plus, it’s the DMV. I could renew my license at the AAA office, but that was half an hour away. However, I could probably make that up in reduced wait time.

I thought about this for the better part of 4 days, waiting until Friday to finally make my move (In my defense, I almost did it on Thursday, but when I woke up, I decided I looked like I had only slept for three hours. Mostly because I had only slept for three hours). This meant that I would have to run to the AAA office, come back to my mom’s, do my daily treatments, pack my things and leave for work.

Packing up my things is always a bit of a process, because I tend to travel pretty heavy. The Cystic Fibrosis means I travel with two machines and various medicines to keep this party going. The combination of inhaled medicine (via air compressor and nebulizer) and a vest that shakes my chest keep my lungs from filling with mucus and a handful of pills before I eat keep my pants from filling with poop. Two machines and a bunch of bottles of pills don’t really seem that bad when I type it out now, but since I have to use the machines twice a day, there’s a small window in which I can actually pack them and it gives me a kind of packing anxiety when I have everything else put in its place, but I still have to take 30 minutes to sit on the couch and shake while I inhale some strange vapors. Not that I don’t wait until the last minute to pack anyway, I just like to have something to blame it on.

I got everything in the car, though thanks to the nap I didn’t have time to drop everything off at my place before running to work. I did, however, find the time to drop off one last poop in my mother’s guest toilet before I ran out of the door.

After I got out of work, I meant to go back to my place, drop off my stuff, pick up the Mother’s Day gift that I so lovingly ordered off of Amazon two days after the holiday, drop it off at my mom’s and do a last check to make sure that I left the house in decent shape for her. Instead, I read a comic book and took a nap. A nap that lasted until roughly 2pm.

I figured I could stop by her house before work on Saturday, drop off her gift, pick up the conditioner I left there and be on my way. I slyly sent her a text message to ask when she’d be coming home and here’s what I got in return (punctuation her’s):

 Jay we just got home Son you have to take care of the toilet I keep dry heaving these mobile home toilets suck there to small We don’t have a plunger I think that’s what we need.

I guess that peanut butter packed a powerful punch.

It didn’t feel like a toilet breaker, but I should have double checked my work. That handful of pills I take with each meal isn’t perfect, so I get a pretty hefty return on anything I eat. I’ve had 30 years to get used it. My mom’s toilet only had 5 days.

This means that the last day of my twenties involved me running to the store, buying my mom a plunger, giving her a late Mother’s Day present, fixing her toilet and then running to work. Hopefully in my thirties, I’ll learn to look after my shit.

*In real life, the closest I came to hunting in my 20s was clipping a doe with the left blinker of my mom’s 1992 Ford Taurus.