Today I left home at 8 a.m. without eating breakfast, and proceeded to spend the next seven hours trapped in a courtroom (as a reporter, not a defendant), where an opportunity for departure was not presented to anyone prior to the conclusion of the hearing.
Long story short, if you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to be hungry to the point where the growling of your stomach is so loud it can momentarily bring a jury trial to a halt, the answer, unfortunately, is yes.
Last summer, we paid a pet groomer eighty dollars to shave our long-haired and very overheated cat. This year, we saved the 80 bucks and did it ourselves. It was late at night and we’d been drinking. I guess we got bored, because we woke up midday Saturday to find the cat with its back shaved, Friar Tuck-style. We finally finished the job last night. I think we found it far more amusing than he did. Now he’s prancing around in his new lightweight summer coat like a little kid on a beach. And he looks fucking ridiculous.
So the other night, I was dreaming about fishing. Then, I’d somehow taken Osama bin Laden prisoner. I had him stuffed into one of those cat carriers that you use to take animals to the vet. Then I was sitting on the box and broke wind into it for, like, a minute. It was quite a loud one and Bin Laden understandably went livid. He got one arm out of the cat box and was grabbing at me and screaming and everything. It’s the last time I break wind on the world’s most wanted terrorist, asleep or not.
This lunchtime, I sneaked off to Wendys and ate a double cheeseburger in my car. I caught a glimpse of myself eating in the mirror. I was hunched over the steering wheel like some grotesque cheeseburger-Gollum. The sky was grey and the car park was an endless sea of tatty SUVs. As I lapped up the succulent, 770-calorie goodness, I watched the people of the strip mall shuffle to and from their cars, and wondered whether a second Biblical flood would be a bad thing or a good thing. I might be too fat to swim to safety.
I got a brand new bicycle; I got a cool new bike! Went to Walmart to buy it and I got a lime green bike. My bicycle has a basket rack and shiny lovely wheels. I went riding on my bicycle and had to walk it up a hill. I got laughed at for having to dismount my bike, but as soon as I got near my street, I hopped on it right. I couldn’t let the neighbors see the shame of me and my bike. If anyone besides my husband saw, I wouldn’t have been well liked.
Holloway Road, London. A little man in Reeboks has just beaten the shit out of his girlfriend in the street below our office. He screamed at her for five minutes as she cowered in their car, then dragged her out and punched and kicked her through the traffic to the other side of the street, where the screaming continued.. As she stands there crying, poking forlornly at her mobile phone, he returns to his car, retrieves a load of stolen B&H cigarettes and fake Stone Island tops from the boot, and tries to sell them to our receptionist.
It’s a surreal experience. There are black-power activists and crazy Christians shouting on their horns under a Chinese Arch. Hipsters walking around in outrageous outfits, waiting on the bus to NYC contrast nicely against dicks walking around with sticks up their asses sporting polos, button-ups and utterly boring shoes. Scalpers outside the Verizon Center and bums attacking for cigarettes after sleeping on the side- walks are all living together among American food and shopping chains and Chinese restaurants. The Livingsocial offices and all of its 1300 employees running around happily make for an interesting and lovely melting pot.
There is a large and slowly growing puddle of liquid by the drinks fountain in our office kitchen, and I’m enjoying watching my colleagues pretending it’s not there. The first person to acknowledge it will have to do the decent thing and mop it up. However, the puddle is almost a meter wide now, and it’s getting increasingly harder to nonchalantly step over while deliberately not looking at it. Either someone’s going to crack and break out the mop, or there’s going to be a spinal/ankle injury plus a ruined pair of Dockers. My money’s on the latter.
I gave up smoking several months ago. I’m fine 97 percent of the time. During the other 3 percent, though, when I’m stomping around the house wondering about kicking the dog, I’ve noticed my wife trying to placate me with food. The other day she offered to go and get me a Five Guys burger when a garden DIY project went awry. I had a sudden vision of myself as a giant child, sitting on the lawn in a messy bib, howling and screaming and red-faced and blowing snot for a piece of cake. Live smoke-free, guys. It’s great.
It’s Saturday morning in my college house. I wake up, my head banging with hangover. The pillow is cold and hard and white. It’s not actually a pillow; it’s the downstairs bathroom floor. I stand, painfully, climb to my feet and open the door. There stands the caretaker, a stout man in his sixties. What’s going on, I say. I think you been on the piss, he says. I grin raffishly, and give him a ‘what’s a guy gonna do’ shrug. It’s a nice moment. He nods and closes the door. I realize I’m naked from the waist down.