During the last school vacation week, my Daughter was allowed to bring home M&M, the Hamster her class keeps as a pet.  He’s named after the candy; his constant homophobic diatribes are purely coincidental.  I’m kidding of course.  If I actually thought the hamster was talking, I wouldn’t tell anyone.  I’d send anonymous letters to the local media after I’d punished everyone he told me to.

M&M has a neat little trick.  You hand feed him sunflower seeds and he stuffs them into his cheek pouches, just loads them in until his face is fatter than his body, and then runs off and spits out all his treasure for later.  “I wonder if I could do that?”  I thought, and instants later
as my horrified wife and child watched, I scooped up little M&M and shoved him into my mouth.

Now, somewhere here, there’s a mental disconnect, and it isn’t that I didn’t have as many Hamsters as M&M had sunflower seeds.  Let’s leave aside for the moment that as a primate I don’t have cheek pouches.  The point is, if I wanted my experiment to be parallel, I’d have put
sunflower seeds in my mouth.  Whatever neuron that piece of information runs along is apparently as broken and frayed as my hair after an overly long session with the blowdryer.  This might be a good point to digress for a moment and say that if you’re anticipating some sort of Richard Gere joke, you can stop holding your breath.  That kind of easy cheap shot, while admittedly titillating, is something just about anybody could whip off.  I know you’re waiting for it, but make up your own damn joke.  I’m not going to prostitute my art merely for the satisfaction of your Bourgeois sentimentality.  Besides, that’s just an urban legend.  It was a gerbil.

The Hamster/Sunflower seed mishap is something like the cognitive malfunction that finds me in the kitchen at two a.m. wearing only my undershorts, knowing I went there for a reason, but totally blank as to what it was.  It probably has something to do with food, but I can’t be certain.  Maybe I just feel pretty in there.  It’s dark; I’m alone, mostly naked.  Are the things I do to feel good about myself really any of your business?

While I eagerly anticipate becoming a cranky and frightening old man as soon as possible, I’m not that keen on collecting bed sores in a poorly funded old age home.  So I think you’ll understand why these little episodes scare me.  Last night for instance. I stripped down to my
skivvies, brushed and flossed my teeth and applied a wide range of personal creams and unguents, many of them prescription strength, to the body parts for which they were intended.  All well and good had I been in my bathroom instead of the Housewares section of my local Walmart.  That of course, is a joke.  I boycott Walmart because of their egregious war on small town American markets and abusive third world labor practices.  I hope you do the same.  It was a K-Mart.

I’d originally assumed that a life time of late nights, cheap gin and adolescent peer induced head trauma had finally come home to roost.  In line with that, my Doctor is running a few tests.  Meanwhile my wife has advanced her own medical opinion, which is that I suffer from a severe
case of ‘Not giving a little tin crap about anything or anyone that isn’t front and center in your own little head, like some kind of three year old Solopsist.”  Not a bad theory, but I think you have to add that even in the case of my own ideas, I can’t be bothered to think about them long enough to follow through successfully.  It’s both a strength and a weakness, making me on the one hand an imaginative, unpredictable storyteller and on the other an incredibly dangerous driver.  Just the other day while commuting to work I got to thinking about “The Partridge
family”, specifically the episode where Laurie starts picking up radio stations on her new braces.  Next thing I knew it was three days later and I was face down in a ditch in Caracas.  Presumably I’d traded the car for the new tattoo of Susan Dey on my left buttock, since the former was gone and the latter stung like sweet Jesus. Unless I’ve got ‘former’ and ‘latter’ mixed up in which case I’ve spoiled the joke. Actually that story is something of an exaggeration. As a conscientious environmentalist, I use commuter rail to get to work. Christ only knows where the tattoo came from.  Anyway, you get my drift.

I know I ought to pay more attention to the real world, but most of it is just so much blah blah, blah, it doesn’t seem a cost effective application of my psychic cash wad.  For every real world event you actually need to be mindful of, like utility bills and the odd city bus careening straight toward you, there’s a mountain of ‘Dawson’s Creek’ re-runs, coworkers unloading the excruciating tediata of their tiny little lives, items of clothing Tommy Hilfigger has scrawled his name across like a meglomaniacal toddler on a crayon spree, and the horrific eventuality that given enough uninterrupted time I may accidentally fantasize about the Olsen Twins.  Why should I sort through a haystack of crap in search of important needles when I could be pretending I was one of the Sailor Scouts but still, you know, a guy?  For those of you without children, the Sailor Scouts are a Japanese girl superhero group.  The members wear schoolgirl sailor suits, have really big eyes and legs that go straight to Cleveland, non-stop express, if you know what I’m saying.

About the only thing that can be said in defense of reality is, it leaves a lot less fur on the inside of your mouth.

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