I need to make a list, a comprehensive list of All the Things I Need. Things run out before you know it. One day the pantry is near burstin’ with food, and the next it is a dusty wasteland containing only a few rusting cans of beets and a box of pistachio Jell-O.
So, the first thing on the list is bananas. Preferably super bananas that don’t ripen so quickly. Seems they are always either green or brown. If they are yellow at all, it is a brief burst of yellow, like a flashbulb going off. Then, it’s just brown spots, and blackness and gooey sap seeping from beneath the peel.
I need more beer, powerful beer, the kind of beer that will help make the world look a bit less like some kind of cruel frontier, full of betrayal and delusion. I’ll add honey to the list, too. To sweeten the hours and quicken the pulse. I’ll have honey on my breath all day.
I need a grocery store haircut. It’ll be a monk’s tonsure, with several product endorsements plastered on my pate. I need medicine for my rickets, and a new apron. I need clam sauce, genital numbing cream, and baby wipes, too.
***
I have been tossing around the idea of getting a private nurse. Not that I am sick. But, if I scrimped, stopped buying expensive coffees, canceled my subscriptions to Maxim, Mustache Aficionado and American Dildo, and sold my Curlique Collection on eBay, I could easily afford it. She could come in a few times a week, take my temperature, change my bedpan, and feed me some Malt o Meal. Who wouldn’t benefit from that? Besides, this Meals on Wheels thing isn’t working out.
I’d offer you a discount except that nobody’s even letting me train as a goddamned nurse yet. Not on BS terms, at least–and BS is my only term, as you will have surmised.
Oh, and you’re cross-country. Fascinating fool, when will you be vacationing in the Pacific Northwest?
Nursin’
When you say BS, do you mean Bachelor of Science, bullshit, Bobby Short, bobby socks or spina bifida (backwards)?
Go ahead and write me a coupon for some private nursin’, and when you finally do earn your golden thermometer, and slip into those white hose, I’ll cash it in. Where did you apply, btw? OHSU?
My gal, now fiance, is from them parts–Olympia, actually; we met when we both lived in Portland–so, perhaps not vacationing per se but definitely visiting. Not sure we’ll be there anytime soon. As I am ass deep in grad school loveliness.
where have you and your lustrous beard disappeared to?