I read a poem, or maybe it was a short story; hell, maybe my mum just told me, but they say that when you really liked someone, maybe you were even in love with them, you were on cloud nine. I didn't necessarily like the saying, but I was definitely up there somewhere.

The other clouds below nine must have felt pretty ripped off. There you were, floating along in the sky, thinking you're not doing too badly for a pile of water vapour that will eventually just fall back down to the earth during a rainy patch, and that smug bastard nine rolls by as the cool kid. I wondered if rain was just the rest of the clouds committing suicide because they were so jealous of nine.

The date with Jodi had been one of the best nights of my whole life, in that weird way where everything that happened by itself would have royally sucked the hind tit. Strung together, on the other hand, and with the company I enjoyed that night with the lovely Jodi, it made for a fantastic adventure where I was the hero. Or at least the main guy. Hero was probably stretching the truth a little bit. I did get my ass handed to me by a six foot hooker and her minions.

My mum had even commented on how happy I looked the next morning. She asked why I had bruises all over the place, and why I smelled like cheap perfume. I didn't think it was really helpful for my mother's weakened mental state to tell her how I got into a fight with a battalion of prostitutes while defending my oldest friend who I was falling in love with, so I just said that Jodi was trying a new kind of perfume and I'd lent her my jacket for a while.

"Well, you should tell her to change perfumes," Mum said. "That smells like a brothel." 

I decided not to pry into why my mother knew what a brothel smelled like. I didn't want or need to know.

"That doesn't explain the bruises," she said.

I wasn't looking at her, but I didn't need to look at her to know that she was boring into the side of my skull with her eyes trying to read my mind and see if I was trying to concoct a lie.

"Gym class," I said too quickly.

"Gym class." 

I nodded.

"All those bruises, and that loose tooth," she said as she pointed at the tooth that was a little crooked since the previous night's misadventures. "All that is from gym class." 

I nodded again. I could tell she didn't believe me, at least not entirely.

"What the hell are you doing in gym class to get so beaten up?" she asked.

"Sports." 

Her coffee cup hit the table and some coffee splashed out over the side.

"Will, if you don't want to tell me why you look like the wrong side of a plantar's wart, fine. Just don't assume that I'm some grieving, wandering half-wit that's suddenly completely disinterested in her son‟s welfare."

I nodded again. "Sorry, Mum. I'll try to keep the lies and half truths to myself."

"I'd appreciate that."

She looked tired. Tired and sad.

"How are you, Mum?" I asked as we sat down to Saturday morning breakfast.

I'd taken the day off work sick, because I could hardly move from all my bruises. It still stung to take a deep breath. I hadn't sat down for a meal with Mum for a very long time. Not since before I'd started the man quest.

"Tired," she said. "Sad." 

My suspicions weren't off the mark. I guessed I knew her pretty well. She had been my mum for 16 years. You'd think I'd at least have some idea of how she was feeling.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Yeah," she replied. "Your sisters aren't doing so well." 

"None of them?" 

"None of them." 

"Well, Dad's only been gone for a little while. It's still pretty raw." 

"It's not just that. These things run their course in a fairly typical pattern. We went through it when my dad died years ago. I wasn't much older than you when it happened. You're sad for a long time, then you're pissed off, then you're sad again, and eventually you start to realize that everything's okay, but you're going to miss that person every day for the rest of your life." 

I crunched my cereal in silence for a few moments. She took a couple of giant swigs of coffee, which I had to admit smelled mighty good. I'd never had a cup of coffee with my mum, and now seemed as good a day as any to move into that phase of our mother-son relationship. I stood up, went over to the mug cupboard and pulled out one of the regular-sized ones; a navy blue one that had the address of a long defunct real estate agent emblazoned in gold on the side. No sense in being ridiculous and greedy when you were doing something you'd been forbidden to do up to this point. I took my mug to the coffee maker and filled the mug right to the brim with steaming, fragrant and beautiful coffee. Mum didn't even bat an eyelash. It was as though we'd been coffee drinking buddies since birth.

"Cream's in the fridge," she said. "I don't know how you like it." 

"Black, usually," I said.

I brought my coffee over to the table and gave it an appreciative sniff. Despite the questionable taste, the smell was always amazing. Pure, glorious and untainted brew. Heavenly. I lifted the coffee to my mouth and took a ginger little taste.

"Usually?"

I froze in mid-sip. My lip throbbed from the near-boiling temperature of my coffee, so I put the mug back down on the table.

"Well, you see, Viktor and I have, in the past, you know, before this moment in time, a couple of times, tried coffee." 

"A couple of times?" she repeated, with one maternal eyebrow raised just slightly higher than normal.

She had me. I don't know how she'd done it. Was there some sort of mother school you went to once you found out you were pregnant for the first time where they gave you a book of how to have your kids paint themselves into a corner without really trying? I think the dear, sweet woman sitting across the table from me had taken the class twice just so she could really mess with my head whenever she felt like it. This wasn't the first time I'd been bamboozled without Mum really saying anything.

"I've been drinking coffee since I was fifteen," I confessed.

"I know," she said.

"You do?" 

"Of course I do, Will. And if that's the worst thing you're doing chemically, then I'm not saying anything else about it." 

She focused on her breakfast a little too intensely to be considered relaxed, as if she was waiting for me to confess something else. I had nothing to tell her. I was a pretty innocent little pumpkin, and she had nothing to worry about. I'd seen too many other kids at my school go down the road of chemically-enhanced stupidity, and it just didn't appeal to me.

"Don't worry, Mum," I said. "I'm pretty much a loser."

"Who said you were a loser?" she asked, in her best impression of a mama bear.

"I'm calling myself a loser. I don't do any of that stuff. It makes me sleepy. You don't have much a social life when you're asleep."

"But you have done it?" 

"A couple of times, yeah." A look of concern flashed across her features. Her little boy was talking openly to her about typical teenage issues. It felt kind of gross, being involved in a very after-school special sort of conversation like this. If sick synthesizer music started playing, or one of the dads from Full House entered the room and started singing a song about what it's like being a kid with tough choices, I was going to barf all over the kitchen.

"I'm worried and not worried about you, Will," said Mum. "I don't know what you're doing right now, but I do know that it's very important to you." 

I nodded. I couldn't tell her everything, because I felt it highly unlikely that she would approve of my Spain trip, and what I was intending to do once I got to Spain. I knew that right now I was financially about halfway to getting my ticket, and the last thing I needed right now was my mum putting a big old kibosh on my manquest. Not if my sisters were struggling so bad. The sooner I got my jobs done, the sooner I could be back to help with the family.

"I just want you to be careful, Will," Mum said. "We need you. I need you. You kids are the only thing keeping me going right now." 

I'd never heard a more loaded statement in my life. She was basically saying that her life depended on us. That's the way I took it. She was sitting there in front of me, scraping the last bits of her breakfast into her mouth and sipping the dregs of her coffee, telling me that we were the only things keeping her going.

"Mum, one day we're all going..." 

"Not yet, you're not," she said, waving a hand at me to stop me. I didn't know what she thought I was going to say. Whatever it was, she didn't want me to finish.

"Just promise me you'll be careful." 

"I promise, Mum. I'll be careful. The first sign of trouble, I'll run screaming into the night," I said.

She smiled and even laughed a little.

"Maybe don't scream as you're running," she said. "That's just embarrassing." 

She reached over to me and patted my hand. Her hands were cold; almost as if the arms had forgotten to carry the blood all the way down to the fingertips.

"We'll be okay, Will," she said.

"I hope so," I asked. "Do you think the girls will be okay?" 

The same look of concern from before clouded her face for a second. It was the second look that changed everything. It was time to move onto step two.

Guns n' Roses have a song called "Patience." It was a slower song, one of their more acoustic numbers. Decent song, but complete and total hypocrisy. If I'd ever seen Axl and co. be anything more than spastic gits that smashed things on stage and got drunk during concerts, sometimes not even showing up to concerts, then maybe I could buy them doing a song about one of the more challenging virtues that is not commonly practiced by the average human being.

Patience is dead.

It's a culmination of a few things. The twentieth century has much to do with the steady and ultimate demise of patience. We've built ourselves a society where everything can happen for the everyday citizen practically as they're thinking about it. If I want a tall, frosty carbonated beverage, I can actually call up a place and have it delivered to my home within half an hour. I can hop into my automobile and get it for myself in five minutes or less. 

Correspondence is another victim of the patience wars. A hundred years ago, people were still sitting down in candlelight to write a nice, long letter to a loved one far, far away. They were taking their time with the letter, thinking of all the wonderful things they wanted to say to Auntie Margie. The telegram was born, so the more urgent messages could be sent right away. It might take the telegraph office a couple of days to get the message to the recipient, but they'd get it and it would have been a heck of a lot quicker than that old paper letter. The phone was the next weapon against patience, all but rendering letter-writing obsolete. Instead of waiting to tell Auntie Margie that my budgie Fergus had taken a turn for the worse and was now moulting as often as he was eating in a long-winded letter, I could call her the second I noticed something wrong with Fergus and ask her about it right then. It was a stunning breakthrough, and we all thought we had it pretty good.

Then we all started hating each other again. The so-called personal computer made things more impersonal than they were before Thog was dragging Thoggette around by the hair. Within ten years of the introduction of the box that shut down conversation, the English language had been reduced to a system of poorly constructed abbreviations, hideous grammar and punctuation so bad a blind dog with massive inbreeding would be able to look at it and go "that comma don't belong there. Please kill me." Emails, instant messages, text messages, tweets, blogs, the entire Wikipedia phenomenon...all of it designed for us to never have to wait more than a few breaths for information about anything or anyone. If I wanted to find out how my cousin Bernie was doing while he drove through the busiest street in all of Rio de Janeiro, I could punch in a few letters and find out exactly how he was doing. It was impersonality in its purest form. Patience was dead. 

If I didn't get my latte within two minutes of ordering it, I had every right to complain and have the poor sixteen year old – steaming milk so hot she would lose her epidermis if it touched her – get all flustered and hand me a little drink coupon. If my pizza arrived more than thirty minutes after the time I called the pizza place, the pizza man would have to give it to me for free, and take the hit on his own paycheck. What do I care, he took too long! I'm hungry now, I want my money's worth.

The internet's too slow. My phone's not getting service. Look at that line! I've been sitting here fifteen minutes, and no one's refilled my drink!

Doesn't anyone realize that less than a hundred years ago, it could take three to six months to get across the ocean? A three hour trip would take a few days? We've been spoiled absolutely rotten by our sense of impatience and need for convenience and speed, and learned nothing from it. Instead of just relaxing with our new found freedom from the old world's time commitments, where making dinner could have taken the entire day, we've turned to other, even stupider time-wasting pursuits. Does anyone really, ever, in the entire course of their lives, need to base jump? Need and want are not the same thing. Need is when the consequence of not doing something is death. Want is when you desire something frivolous that will give you a moment of pleasure. Base jumping is not the best way to avoid death. Just saying.

But if I miss my bus to the base jumping place, I'll have to wait fifteen minutes. And that will make me want to just kill someone.