Try as I might, I sometimes forget to be grateful. I try and wake up every morning and even before I have my customary 2 cups of black coffee, I try to sit and just meditate. Not think about negative things. I like thinking about negative things. It’s hard wired in my body, mind and spirit. I like worrying. I like stressing about things so much that I almost create a complete panic attack. I don’t know why. I just wake up and start thinking negative shit. Like, why did you eat that whole bag of cookies right before bed? You’re an idiot. You should’ve stopped at 2 cookies, but no, you had to eat the whole bag.

And now you have a sugar hangover and have to drink lemon water to balance out your liver. Now you have to wait 20 minutes to drink your coffee. If you didn’t have those cookies you could’ve just had your coffee 30 seconds after getting out of bed.

So I try and break this cycle by sitting and meditating and being grateful. I’ve read a lot of books about gratitude and have learned that they all mostly say to sit first thing in the morning and write down things you’re grateful for. It’s almost as if everyone knows human beings will find something to complain about or be fearful of or just plain be unsatisfied with the way things are. So they’ll all mostly tell you to stop that shit and write down 5-10 things you’re grateful for.

My problem is, after about the first week or so, I’ve already written about how grateful I am for my 1) breath, 2) wife, 3) children, 4) mother-in-law, 5) health and most of all, 6) my rapidly approaching millions of dollars leaping gleefully into my bank account.

But after about a week I just get tired of doing the exercise and go back to sitting around listening to old Grateful Dead concerts on my computer.

But I’m gonna try again. So here’s a few things I’m grateful for:

1. I’m grateful my cat knows I’m a complete idiot sometimes but still bites my arm and leaves huge scratches in my skin. All out of a deep unconditional feline love.

2. I’m grateful to see Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on Instagram dancing around like a complete freak. And yesterday I got to see Flea’s new shaved head hair dye design—all brilliant colors, looking like street art or a tie-dye—still dancing around like a complete freak and still looking like he's 25 years old. He gives me hope that someday I may do the same.

3. I’m grateful for the 30 cents a gallon triple reverse osmosis carbon block ultraviolet light purified water I can get in front of the grocery store using my BPA free 5 gallon plastic containers I bought on Amazon with the Amazon gift card I got for my birthday.

4. I’m grateful for my fingers. When I was a kid, my friend's mom told me (she was a nurse) that if I kept cracking my knuckles I’d end up with arthritis as an adult. What a mean thing to say. I like cracking my knuckles. They sound like popcorn popping. I’ve cracked my knuckles for over 55 years and my fingers still dance and sing like little children at an over-priced pre-school.

5. I’m grateful for whatever hair I have left on my old bald head. It gives me and my wife a chance to bond as she shaves it every few weeks. And I don’t have to leave her a tip or make dumb small talk like I did with the people who cut my hair in the corporate franchise haircutting places I used to go to before Covid. My wife has heard so much dumb shit come out of my mouth that now I just try not to squint too hard when she trims my eyebrows. She doesn’t like it when I squint real hard. It makes it hard for her. She says, “Stop squinting!” And I’m sure she’d rather be doing anything else under the sun than shaving her husband's head, watching our hardwood floors get covered in black and grey clumps and chunks of my random dead hair.

At least if she shaved Flea’s head, she’d see rainbows on the floor…