Today, after risking my old high-risk life by shopping at a supermarket on Fort Eddy Road, I came out and my car, which has been to the shop twice for the same problem, again had a dead battery.

I called my wife for a jump-start, but of course her phone was in her purse and she didn’t answer. I hooked up my $100 emergency lithium battery jumper pack, advertised as able to start the diesel engine of a semi, and turned the key. A rapid clicking ensued. In the old pre-computer days that meant that the solenoid was trying to get the starter motor to turn but just didn’t have the juice to do it. I’m pretty sure this modern clicking was the car laughing in a code that included insults and obscenities.

I thought of calling a neighbor with a pickup truck because I could ride in the bed, still legal in New Hampshire, without endangering him. But, while fiddling with the connections to the battery, my cellphone slipped out of my vest and fell into a gap next to the fender. It lodged out of sight in the wheel well. I considered it a blessing at that point, that my wife didn’t return my call: “I would have answered, honey, but I couldn’t reach my phone.”

I returned to the store, while avoiding several unmasked senior males who wandered imperiously about despite the mandate, and asked customer service to call Triple-A. Help arrived, despite the 45-minute estimate, in 15. A genial young guy jumped my car with a much bigger battery pack. Size, apparently, does matter. He retrieved my cellphone by taking out a bunch of plastic screws under the car. I tipped him $20 for going beyond the call of roadside duty.

“Your battery and alternator are fine,” he said after consulting his tester, “but your car has a parasitic drain. They can be really hard to find.” So I’ve discovered. My car will soon be back in the shop for further tests, but the road savior’s words made me wonder how many other parasitic drains I have in my life.

I know there are at least a few leeches fastened to my bank account. There’s the gym I haven’t been to since April, which closed for a time and suspended its auto-tap on my account but restarted it some months ago despite warnings that gyms remain unsafe. There’s the magazine whose online subscription I pay for though I never read it. And there’s Amazon Prime, which I unwittingly signed up for a couple years ago. I was planning to jump through the reportedly endless hoops to cancel when the pandemic made online purchases routine so I remain enrolled. There are others. Annual fees for credit cards I never use, mysterious fee increases for monthly services that resist explanation.

A planned battle against the parasites is on the agenda, but inertia is a force that takes a lot of dedication and effort to overcome. Savvy account parasites count on that, even build it into their business models. There are, of course, people in everyone’s orbit who are energy vampires, but as far as I know no one has devised a meter to measure that. And, in pandemic times, most of those drains are unplugged.

The biggest drain, I fear, is somewhere in the internal circuitry. Energy consumed by regret over what might have been is energy wasted. Same with energy consumed by envy. Then there are the calories burned by deciding what to do after winning Powerball or Mega Millions. That seems like harmless fantasy, economic air guitar, but it no doubt takes the place of thoughts that might be more productive.

Worry, which in its extreme form is anxiety, is often, though not always, a parasitic energy drain. If worrying about finances, for example, results in increased earnings or savings, if not taken to extremes, that has real value. If worrying about catching COVID-19 results in social distancing and not just mask wearing but an upgrade to two- or three-layer masks, that’s productive. It makes you, and everyone else, safer.

But worrying about things beyond one’s, or anyone’s, control just runs the psychic battery down. A month or so from now, if vaccine supplies hold and the creek don’t rise, we should be able, having finally solved the Rubik’s Cube of a combined state and federal enrollment process that was better than expected but harder than it should have been, to reduce the COVID anxiety drain.

Then, the next time my car won’t start and I’m far from home, I’ll laugh and think, “Could be worse.”

(Ralph Jimenez of Concord is a member of the Monitor’s editorial board.)