The Old Demon: Routines

Parents, as they get older, fall into and feel safer within their routines. When their bodies, their minds, and the world around them become more and more out of reach and out of their control, they cling to the routines that show them they are surviving in an unforgiving world.

The old demon has followed a routine for the last thirty years. There were certainly years we didn’t speak where I was not privy to his day-to-day schedule, but I suspect it didn’t change that much.

To be precise, it’s not one routine “to rule them all” it’s actually several routines. For our purposes, we will stick to the two main routines. The morning routine and the evening routine.

As a boy, my father would get up early for work and retreat into the bathroom for forty-five minutes. This was not strictly a shower and shave ritual. While that was part of it, the absolute necessity was emptying his bowels.

He would tell my brother and me he shit every morning on the dot. It was a non-negotiable in his mind. Even as a boy, I knew this could be a tricky operation. I mean, you can’t really know when you’ll have to go, will you? Some days it might be after lunch. Some days, not at all. I knew this as a kid.

“Well, what do you do if you don’t have to go?” I would ask.

My father would just look at me and say, “You need to concentrate. You need to train your mind.”

This sounded like a ninja training operation. Forcing a turd every day on the dot seemed excruciating. Not to mention, a recipe for chronic hemorrhoids. I didn’t know what a hemorrhoid was at that age, but I knew what straining on the toilet felt like.

It says a lot about the mental gymnastics my father must have gone through. This attempt at controlling your body and environment has revealed itself over the years to mean different things. When I was younger, I saw it as a special power endowed to fathers. Specifically, fathers as intense as mine. Years later, as a grown man, I saw it as a desperate attempt to right a ship that was already leaning over to one side.

I think that’s what routines are. An attempt to control the uncontrollable. Friends and family might advertise them as time-saving, daily hacks to make your life easier, but it’s really just a way to stifle it. Eventually, it becomes a prison from which you can’t escape.

Some routines appear benign and almost necessary. “We like to do our shopping during off-peak times to avoid the heavy crowds.”

Sometimes you hear about a routine that makes you spit out your coffee. The father of an extended family member told me years ago that he taught his dog to shit on command.

When I heard this, I did, in fact, spit out my coffee and laughed hysterically. He wasn’t laughing, though. When I asked him to explain how that actually worked, he told me that when he took the dog for walks, he would simply give the dog the command “Release!” And the dog would stop, squat, and shit uncontrollably as if it was a button installed deep inside its colon that, when activated, forced the dog into a hyperactive peristalsis that pushed the turds out automatically.

I told him I didn’t believe that for a second. If a dog has to go, it goes. Was there really a need to install such a command?

“Listen, time is money. If I don’t give the command, that dog will sniff around for an hour just to keep the walk going.”

The password is control.

He was serious. One day, he had his dog with him. Can’t remember the dog’s name, but when he took the dog for a walk, I told him I wanted to see this command in action.

He was perfectly fine with that. And as we walked, the dog made no normal displays of sniffing, circling, speeding up, or posturing that would tell you a shit was imminent. Nothing. The dog just lumbered along slightly ahead of us.

Then I looked at his owner. I intended to get satisfaction. He didn’t say a word to me, but called out his command in a stern, forceful manner. “Release!”

The dog stopped instantly, squatted on the sidewalk, and pushed out a large curling turd onto the hot pavement. When finished, the dog walked away from it as though it didn’t exist. His owner picked it up with a plastic bag, and that was that.

This routine appeared wholly unnecessary and rather oppressive to the dog. It took the fun out of the walk, I imagine.

But I digress…

Thus ended the morning routine for my father. It didn’t matter if it was a workday, a weekend, or a day off. It was always the same.

Most family members get scuppered by the evening routine. For my father, the evening routine was based around happy hour. The hour from 4 P.M. to 5 P.M. was the sacred time when my father and my stepmom would go to his local bar for a drink. None of these places was fancy. They were local bars, some of them dives, and a collection of fraternal organizations such as the Eagles, the Elks, and the Moose. Any place that offered a cheap beer or a glass of wine. Some of these local bars were attached to restaurants. So, if you sat there at the bar with him as he had his daily consumption of drinks, you would smell food and get hungry. Sometimes, you went in starving.

What you couldn’t do was order food. If you were hungry and said, “Listen, Dad. Do you mind if we order some food? I’m starving.”

“Just wait,” he’d bark. “We’ll eat when we leave. We’ll take it to go.”

It was just one of the weird quirks he had. You simply had to sit there and wait until he was ready to go, then you’d order the food, but not eat it, until you got back to the house.

Now, what part of his ego or world this rule was holding up, it was doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting. It was not a “one-off” thing. This odd situation repeated many times over the years.

Control.

In later years, I would call my father up and tell him I was coming down for a visit and that I wanted to take him to a nice Indian restaurant. I knew he loved Indian food, so it only made sense to me that he would enjoy a pleasant change.

“I found the best Indian restaurant in your town. I want to take you there for some food.”

I could feel the hesitation on the other end of the line.

“Do you not think you would like that, Dad?” I’d ask.

“Well, yeah,” he’d answer, trailing off at the end.

“What’s worrying you?”

“What time will we be back? We go to the lodge at four.”

The mere idea that a shitty, cheap glass of red wine would be more important to him than a kick-ass Indian dinner at the best Indian restaurant in San Diego County was mind-boggling to me.

But such is the nature of the routine. It commands loyalty and attention. There have been many planned or soon-to-be-planned outings I’ve had to scrap simply because it’s not worth hearing about how badly it screwed up his daily routine. You simply stopped asking because it wasn’t worth the grief.

For me, I eventually settled on the rule that if I spent time with him, it would need to be within the structure of his daily routine.

I’ve been known to be a bit of a curmudgeon. Now, at fifty-five, I’m finally aging into it nicely. I know this about myself. Even things I want to do, I shake off. A friend of mine once asked me at the last minute if I wanted to go see the band Motorhead.

I love Motorhead. Of course, I wanted to see Motorhead.

“It’s tonight,” my friend said.

“Right. Ummmm,” was all I could manage to say.

When my friend asked me why I was hedging, the following words came out of my mouth. “I think I’d like it better if it were my idea.”

Wow. What an incredibly telling statement. I’d seen Motorhead countless times. There wasn’t a pressing need to see them. I, in fact, wanted to see them, but I had chosen not to go because it wasn’t on my terms.

What a miserable bastard. I wonder where I got that from.

So, while I can understand how routines based on control can start, I also know what it’s like to live under the tyranny of one.

Now, in 2026, my father still has routines, but his age and frailty make it hard to follow a solid routine as his body refuses to cooperate. For him, making it through the day takes up more of his time than worrying if he’s following the golden routine that has carried him this far in life.

Watching it wither and die is kind of comforting in a way, but sad when you realize there is nothing to take its place. It’s just a void.