NIGHTMARES AGAIN

I keep having this recurring nightmare. I’m picking up my things from Matthew’s house, and my mobile phone rings, and it’s my sister, Natalie, calling to tell me that Leslie has killed herself, and I need to fly to Boston to help sort things out. I hang up the telephone and ask Matthew if I can use his computer to book an airline flight. He tells me no, that I need to leave his apartment, because Colleen is coming over. I say, "but I asked you to be alone when I came over to pick up my things," and he says, "but Colleen wants to come over, and it would have hurt her feelings to have said no."

I wake up crying.

GLUTTONY BONDING

My niece and I have been engaging in "Gluttony Bonding." It’s sick. Every day, my goal is, today, I am not going to eat until I want to throw up. That’s my big goal. That is my greatest aspiration at this point in my life. It seems like such a humble wish, and yet, I fail and fail.

The day before yesterday, we reached a new low. We went to a buffet restaurant, and smuggled out mini-corndogs in her diaper bag. We have discovered that breast-feeding is the perfect cover for this sort of activity. The blanket goes up, the mini-corndogs slide underneath, and voila, snack for later.

Prior to this outing, I was feeling guilty about my snobbery. I turn my nose up at everything in Spokane. But let’s face it, how much of a snob can you really be if you’re smuggling mini-corndogs out of a buffet restaurant?

My trousers don’t fit any more. I’m going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe if this keeps up. Mind you, at the beginning of the summer, I was this lean and lanky thing (comparatively), and now I’m trying to figure out how to squeeze into my fat clothes.

Today I was riding my bicycle through the neighborhood. This was a sort of nodding acknowledgement to the need for increased physical exertion. At the beginning of the summer, I was cycling around every day, and now I give a passing thought to the bike every six weeks or so.

As I passed one of the nearby schools, a bus was pulling up, and I was wondering how they might feel about having a strange adult passing so close to the loading bus. Then I realized, hey, what will they think? I have a bomb strapped to my bicycle?

Have you noticed that suicide bombers always drive or fly to their deaths? I can’t say I blame them. I mean, if you know you’re going to die in the next twenty minutes, make yourself comfortable. You don’t hear about suicide bombing bicyclists. Or exploding joggers, for that matter.

It’s a well-documented fact that bad people don’t cycle. Admit it—you’ve never heard of a cycle-by shooting, have you? Have you ever told a child, "Never get on a strange bike with someone you don’t know"? Men don’t cycle by to pick up prostitutes. Anthrax-ridden messages aren’t even delivered by bike messengers. They just know better.

I’m trying to develop some kind of theory about this, but the only thing I can think of at the moment is that the endorphins allegedly released by exercise make people in too good a mood to blow other people up. I don’t like this particular theory, because exercise has never made me anything but miserable, and I have to admit that I’d probably bomb some health and fitness guru when I was through, if only I had enough energy left to get up off of the…hey!

I think I may have just figured it out.