“My Whaa?” A Scary Tale in Two Acts

(Dinner at Iraqi restaurant named for a Quintessentially Southern American city in Georgia, with upscale Current Gen Martinis with sweet liquor added for the little ladies. A handicapped parking space steps from the door, dinner for 2.5 people.)

TCG: Did Mother tell you about her memory?

DOB: My whaaa…?

TCGL Your memory. How it’s been improving.

DOB: Oh yeah? Oh, yeah! I’m making more sense than I was, before, you know, after, when I fell and hit my head? Much better memory oh yeah.

WISIMH: Hyperbole is such an overused word these days. It’s a shame, really because then, when a situation comes along that seems to advance the very postmodern definition of “memory” as including the brain as some epheremal sprite, which tends to desert us in old age and whatnot. And such as. Query: Is another overused word passion? As in, “I’m passionate about my new French manicure,” or “About my new diet that starves your shrinking oxygen-starved brain into a tiny walnut-shaped shell of its former self?" Amid such existential musings:

TCG: … It could be the vitamins your taking too, right?

DOB: My whaa?

TCG: The supplements from Life Extension?

DOB: Oh yes! My Vitamin 12

TCG: Right! Your Vitamin B 12

WISIMH: Seriously? That’s the best ya got? My vision is blacking out at the edges, narrowing into a hallucinatingly alternative universe where there was liberty, and justice, and Vitamin 12 For All. Under frickin’ god. And I’m an atheist.
Query: They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Which, of course, they’re wrong. But notwithstanding the foregoing however, staring insanity in it’s cold and trembling watery eye before the first martini kicks in? Would that make an atheist pray for god, for death, for those Japanese knives on QVC? Personally, I’ve found my own god. I’m a Frisbeetarianism. I believe that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

A (not so) Cynical Look

“In conversations I more and more often catch a puzzled expression on the other person’s face, an eyebrow raised questioningly, a slight frown on the brow. I am increasingly obliged to stop and add a footnote. “I was joking. Sorry…”
There are two possible causes of these misunderstandings:
a) I have changed, alas, and I am slowly moving towards the pathetic prospect of an old age spent making boorish and foolish social gaffes;
b) I have not changed, but the world around me has, so my message increasingly misses its target, or at least so it seems to me.
Both possibilities equally threaten my relation to the world. And if that relation is not improved, my position may soon become completely isolated.”
- Dubravka Ugresic, Thank You for Not Reading, “Come Back, Cynics, All is Forgiven!” (1997)

Neither possibility frightens me. I have stared into the abyss and it has stared back and spit in my face. My relationship to the world is deteriorating. Look World, I need some alone time. It’s not you, it’s me. Isolation is not unwelcome most of the time – Mommy likes her alone time. But sometimes it gets lonely in here, mainly when my roommates are in particularly challenging manic and/or depressive states.

But what the hell. It’s only life, and mine isn’t so bad here with the L’Stranges. At least they’re not robbing liquor stores, conspiring with terrorists, kicking dogs, babbling ominously, writing screenplays, appearing in police-chase videos, or setting fire to their hair. And if some might say that is cynical, I prefer to say po-TOT-o.