 Dark Turns and Noise |
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Choruses of "MOTHERFUCKER!" are ringing through the halls of my building right now as we test our new computer system that is clearly possessed by Satan himself. Meanwhile, the writing of this speech is killing me. I am miserable. I am resorting to Robert Fulghum and Dr. Seuss. I am utterly uninspired. I am bitter that it was even assigned to me. I hate everyone. All I really want to do is go home and eat pancakes. I have been craving pancakes like some kind of a mad dog. I've never even been a regular pancake eater or a huge fan except for the chocolate chip pancakes eaten at Shelley's house when we were children and the banana pancakes at my favorite breakfast dive. I sit here and look up pancake recipes when I'm supposed to be writing this godawful speech. I foam at the mouth. Pancakes. God Grant Me Pancakes. Please sir, can I have some more pancakes? I cannot get over the great press that this new Russell Crowe movie is getting. I never would have thought I would entertain the idea of going to see this, as it just doesn't look like my thing, and I do not suffer from the delusion that Russell Crowe is the best thing ever to grace the screen with which so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be afflicted, but my God! It sure is getting a lot of praise. I might go see it for Paul Bettany alone. Have I mentioned that this speech is giving me a stomachache? Surely I can't get an ulcer from a speechwriting assignment. Surely my innards are tougher than that. Apparently I am not so tough, because we just had a staff meeting about staph infections and I walked out because I sincerely felt like I was going to vomit. Everyone else is still down there, and I am sitting on my floor all alone. I cannot sit in a room and hear about things like boils being lanced and think about doorknobs and shaking hands and the spit that flies out of people's mouths when they talk to you. NO THANK YOU. I am not kidding when I say I have no idea what to put in this speech. I'm really having kind of a panicky, ugly day here. I'm wearing pants that are too big and I sat on my back patio and talked to Shelley at lunch and didn't realize that the chair was completely dusty because it hasn't rained here in about a decade. So I have on too big dusty assed pants. And I look in the mirror and all I see are all of these zits I didn't have as a teenager which have for some reason decided to wreak havoc on my face and strike their revenge at the tender age of 28 and the circles under my eyes and a weirdly bloated face and just icky icky ickiness. I just feel icky. And I don't want to write this speech. For the first time in 4.5 years, I am fantasizing about quitting my job. That's how much I don't want to write it. All I want to do is wipe my office down with wet wipes and bathe in antibacterial gel although it would probably just make me break out SOME MORE. And I think I'm being punished by the downloading gods because none, not one of the songs from the Wig in a Box album seems to be available for download, and it makes me sad, because I want to buy the CD, but I am impatient, and I just want to hear Rufus Wainwright sing Origin of Love and Ben Folds sing Wicked Little Town right now and I don't have the CD yet. Is that too much to ask? I want my skin to be pretty and clear again. I want to not be preoccupied with pancake obsession. I want to not think about germs and pus and infections. I want someone else to write this speech. Or I want to write a commencement speech from me, and from my heart, and I want to quote real poets and talk about dreams and heartache and soldiering on. I don't want to write it in the voice of a yokel whose voice I cannot replicate. I want to want to go to yoga tonight and feel better about my flabby body instead of dreading it. I want antique stained glass to hang in my bathroom window. I want to paint my foyer orange. I want Hem to come over and sing me to sleep. About this time in ...
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