The story is about finding the front half of my car this morning buried under a pile of cardboard boxes. It isn’t much of a story, but that’s not the problem. As you know, I have no trouble telling stories that have no point or meaning or beginning, middle and end. My whole life is one dull interlude after another, so that’s not why I’m struggling with telling this one. It’s that I don’t know how to tell it.

Scenario number one: When I went out to the garage to get my car this morning, all I had in mind was driving it directly to the Saturn dealer and getting them to fix the broken turn signal. So you can imagine my dismay when I found a pile of empty cardboard boxes strewn all over the front half of the car. They had toppled for no apparent reason, except to aggravate me a little further. Whoever is in charge of annoying me is doing an excellent job lately.

Version two: You know, it probably serves me right. I don’t throw things away, even empty boxes, and my garage is stacked with the packing crates that all my now defunct printers and VCRs and many, many other appliances and devices came in. It’s a big garage, and I have a small car, so it didn’t seem like a big deal. I had some vague notion that one day I’d break up all the cardboard for the recycler, but that never seemed especially urgent. Until today, that is, when I found a dozen or so boxes fallen off their piles, with most of them landing on the hood of my car.

The mundane true life ending of the story: It took me ten or fifteen minutes to get the boxes off the car and re-stack them. No damage was done to the finish of the car, so I drove to the Saturn dealer. I sat there reading my Kindle for an hour and a half while they repaired the faulty wiring and replaced the bulb, to the tune of a hundred and ten dollars. I had been up half the night stewing about this situation (because that’s what I do), and in the end, I think the calamity with the boxes took some of the edge off. I was spent for the rest of the day, but I’d worked out all the anxiety, so it was kind of a wash.