My wife is mad at me because I cannot control my tongue when it comes to bad drivers, and by saying ‘bad,’ I mean STUPID.

Here is the situation: it’s a four-lane roadway, the speed limit is 55 miles-per-hour, and in the slow lane is a dually pick up truck doing only 50 mph, and you are behind him, left turn signal blinking on-and-off, and the drivers in the lane next to you are passing you one at a time, and no one is letting you in so you can pass this fucking idiot — I mean this dually driver.

You finally get around that particular driver, only to have a 1975 Datsun pull slowly into your lane. You were going 55 mph, and they were at a stop sign when they drove into your lane. Mind you — you were only a couple of hundred feet from the stop.

What do you do?

In my case, I stepped hard on the brake, looked for an escape route around the piss-ass – I mean the Datsun truck and driver — then downshifted, blowing by him on his right where there is no roadway, only gravel. Happy to have avoided a crash, I stepped on the gas, but because I’m still in second-gear, I wound out the engine, making it sound like a jet taking off.

That’s when my wife, bless her heart, says, “You’re in the wrong gear. I think I can drive better than you.”

Yup — that’s exactly where Zippy lost his shit.

Mental health is such a tricky thing and after watching two disturbing videos yesterday, I lost control of mine.

The first video, about Anne Frank who hid from the Nazis in a secret room with her family for over two years. The other, about Elisa Lam who in 2013 disappeared and was later found drowned in the water tank of a Los Angeles hotel.

Here’s where my mind slipped: I decided that because I feel isolated like Anne, am manic-depressive like Elisa, I had to create a new ‘isolation’ diary, like Anne and it had to be online, like Elisa’s. Crazy, I know.

Later, in the evening it dawned on me that I should’ve known I was in trouble. That morning, I did what many with our disorder do: I enjoyed some online impulse shopping, spending money I didn’t have. Once back in my right mind, I returned everything and got most of what I spent back, but by then the damage was already done.

Anyway, about fifteen minutes after creating my new ‘online diary,’ I came to my senses, asking, “What in the fuck am I doing?”

It was as if I had suddenly awakened. I immediately deleted the damn thing, knowing I already had one that I could use.

He lost nearly everyone, some to the virus, others to the vaccine. Now, Travis was forcibly removed from his house to a government relocation camp.

Quickly, Travis figured out how to escape the compound. He immediately disappeared into the mountainous terrain of the high desert.

Soon he regretted his decision as starvation had taken hold of his body.

It was mid-winter and very little food available for the wildlife, let alone for a foraging human. Finished, Travis sat down in the snow and awaited death to overtake him.

In the freeze of early morning, Travis finally saw his Black Horse.

Mom loved her pulp mags. We always had four or five issues on the coffee and side tables next to our couch.

One article I read when I was 11 was about Sister Aimee McPherson, an evangelist and founder of the Four Square Church. The story horrified me because, as I remember it, she burned to death after refusing to abandon her church tent when it caught on fire.

Fifty-years later, and I can’t find that version anywhere. The story now is that she was believed to have drowned only to reappear in the desert claiming she was kidnapped.

Mandela’d again.

It wasn’t until they had both cleared the town and were in an open field that it came to his mind that he might be chasing a shadow, so he stopped as the hooded man continued. No longer being pursued, the hooded man stopped and looked back, lowered his hood, revealing himself to be a woman.

Still not sure if the person was real or fake, he stepped forward. Without warning, she raised her gun and fired.

He lay on the damp earth, feeling her soft fingers pushing his hair lightly from his eyes and gently caressed his dying cheek.

Time trouble comes from not fully understanding how our perception can be distorted. For instance:

• Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth of England were born in 1926, and yet we think of one as an old woman and the other, a sex symbol.
• Anne Frank and Rev. Martin Luther King were each born in 1929, making them younger than the Queen of England.
• Thomas Jefferson died when Harriet Tubman was four years old, and Ronald Reagan was two years old when she passed away.
• “The Lion King,” “Forrest Gump,” and “Jurassic Park,” movies all released in October 1994, are now closer in time to the Apollo Moon Landing of July 1969 than they are to February 8, 2021.
• Charlie Chaplin, a star of the silent film era, lived long enough to see the original “Star Wars,” considered to be a computer graphic imagery masterpiece.
• And even if he were still alive, born in 1935, Elvis Presley is younger than William Shatner, who was born in 1931.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t help wonder what my parents did with their time since neither had a television growing up. But then at one point in my life, I didn’t have the Internet or a smartphone, and now I find myself wondering what I did with my time.

Finally, my son, at 28, has never known a world without television or the Internet. I wonder if he ever thinks what it must have been like for Dad to have grown up in the “good old days.”

For months, he battled the ‘demons of the mind’ as he called them. They came, and they went, and he continued to function despite the frightening rapidity of their occurrences.

One morning he hiked to a nearby town. It was abandoned and had been for some time, but it was still the best place to find rags and other odds-and-ends to help make life easier.

The movement was slight, but he had seen it. He quickly raced around the corner in that direction only to find the hooded man standing there.

“Stop!” he shouted as the hooded man began running.

My Cousin Elmo says, “A dyslexic man walks into a bra…”

Soon his mental wanderings became worse. He’d find himself having arguments with nearby trees, and once he believed himself to be playing the harmonica, only to awaken to see his pistol in his hand.

“Was I thinking of killing myself or something?” he asked.

The thought frightened him so much that he decided to not pack the weapon with him when he was out foraging. Instead, he’d carry his rifle for protection.

While checking his trap lines one afternoon, he found himself confronted by the same stranger who had rapped at his car window.

“Hallucination,” he laughed, as the stranger vanished.

The old car, an abandoned station wagon, was now his home. It sat in a copse of trees, on a slight hill near a creek.

Over the two years that he’d been there, he’d pulled out the seats and the steering wheel and added whatever materials he could find from his surroundings. It was there that he slept, and there that he began to have dreams of ‘her.’

He had no idea who she was, yet she comforted him, lightly stroking his face and pushing his long, matted gray hair out of his eyes. He would jump awake every time.