Waiting Room (a ghost story)

I’m attempting to meditate ahead of my final physical with employer-provided health insurance. My goals are clear: 1. Get a blood pressure reading that is considered “fine.” 2. Get as many refills as possible for my generic Zoloft prescription. A little over an hour later I’ll have accomplished both of those goals, but will be scared shitless by the possibility of having to pay $400+ for a 30 day supply of said generic medication. In the interim, there are the tunes. 

Here’s what I remember. I hide my phone, close my eyes, and open my palms in silence, I begin to repeat a mantra while simultaneously counting in intervals of five. Eventually there is music where there had been none. Hope Sandoval is languidly intoning that she wants to “hold the hand inside me.” I begin breathing in time to the gentle waltz, this is working, the volume is low enough to enhance the meditation, not distract from it. But then it’s The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” and I wonder if I could ever DJ again, if I could somehow revitalize that hyper-specific intersection of cool yet accessible party scene that had a real moment during a bygone era of LA nightlife. For example, if Part Time Punks hosted a Cure Nite, a Smiths Nite, a Britpop Nite, etc., my ex would lovingly refer to them as “college fund nights” for the founder’s kid. I was flashing back to many a night behind the DJ booth, throwing on “Boys Don’t Cry” and watching a group of impeccably dressed, drunk strangers fill the floor like they hadn’t heard the song since high school… when in reality they’d probably performed the exact same ritual at a similarly organized dance party a week before… probably even less than a week before. I know this because I watched it happen over and over again and I exhibited the exact same behavior when other people were DJ-ing. Then it’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” by The Clash, which always calls to mind the #rockandrollweirdness (thanks John Wurster!) of my *very conservative stepmom loving that song. And then I’m in an exam room getting my vitals read and then I’m waiting (and waiting and waiting) for my doctor. I can faintly hear “Lovefool” piping through the closed door, followed swiftly by “Your Woman.” It dawns on me that this Silver Lake doctor’s office is teeming with elder millennial women who have all been laid off and are desperately attempting to square up their medical needs before losing their (our) health insurance at the end of the week… on All Fucking Hallow’s Eve, no less. 

This is a collective existential ghost story and it hasn’t fully sunk in yet that we are the ghosts. Because we’re still alive, and our insurance is still paying, they’re treating us with kindness and concern as they dictate recommended follow-up appointments to the app that will ping us relentlessly over the following days. They know full well, as do we, that these follow-ups will not occur. They schedule them anyway, because it’s their ritual. The same way that they queue up some corporately configured playlist of the songs that once made our ears perk up as we were being driven to “bring your daughter to work days” in the 1990s. They play these songs that remind us that the world was once bright, and wide-open, and brimming with possibilities. When our insurance lapses, we will cease to exist to them. But today (for most of us) our vitals are “fine” and so are the tunes.