It’s getting hard out here, lord. I feel like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day,” where every morning when I wake up, I’m forced to deal with some goofy rodent with orange hair crawling out of his hole to tell me it’s gonna be gray & crappy for the next four years. I have actually had to figure out how to turn my notifications off on my phone just to quiet the electrical waves. The mind tends to reel with all these sounds of the machine cranking.

And it is cranking—LOUDLY. Like it might throw a rod. And then—there we’ll be. Stuck on the side of the road with no cell phone. No AAA roadside assistance cause we were lazy and reckless and forgot to renew it. And of course no one will drive by ’cause we’re on some dead end road no one takes. We’ll have to cross the ditch into the wilderness and scavenge for survival essentials. Maybe build an igloo out of hubcaps and old seed corn bags. Make friends with an irritable squirrel, who we’ll name Todd. He’ll teach us about the constellations and his screwy version of astrology. And we’ll all be one with nature and the animal kingdom.

Then, by spring, someone will stumble out to check the fields, and there they’ll find us—a new age Jeremiah Johnson wearing squirrel boots and a coat made out of tree branches. And we will have learned a valuable lesson (sort of), which we’ll forget in about four or five years. Maybe sooner.

(Okay. Well. This is the intermission.)

Yesterday, I got the pleasure of going to the dentist. It’s not so much the stabbing and prodding in the mouth that I don’t like but the TV programs they force you to watch. My dentist has TVs in both the waiting room and in the back room where they work their magic. And so, when he finally leaned the chair back, all I could see was Rachel Ray. Everything RACHEL RAY.

Is it me or is Rachel Ray wanting to die? The poor woman looks like she has given up on life and is eating herself to death on TV with an overly excited clap-on-command audience. I just don’t think it’s good for her soul. Her eyes look dead, like a fish that’s been out of water too long.

And after her show was “The View,” which, strangely enough, had Bob Saget on as a guest. The man did the show “Full House” and the penguin movie about smoking pot. I could not put it together why he was there. Their conversation explained NOTHING. The dentist did eventually turn the show off right before he started stabbing me with a needle and began drilling, so I guess things got better. Yeah, they got better.

As George Carlin once put it to his audience, “It’s all very confusing.”