Day Eighty

Close call!

I work hard for the money, motherfucker, so when I get to my Thursday-one-day-weekend, I gotta cram some shit into a fairly tight slot - and I'm not talking about anal sex. This particular Thursday involved paying some bills, doing some taxes, trying to write a letter to my great aunt, buying ink for my printer to print out some tax stuff, figuring out what to eat for an informal dinner party - Thai Green Chili with Chicken, Mushrooms, and Broccoli over white rice is BANGING: thanks America's Test Kitchen once again - and then purchasing said ingredients from the local Whole Foods, visiting my darling mother-in-law who I hardly ever have the time to see - and that saddens me - and...something else...

...oh yeah. Baking a Red Velvet Cake. The wife has had quite a busy week and I, in an attempt to be the best husband possible, put on an apron, and got to work. I woke up at seven yesterday morning and cut my normal 'leisure morning' quite short. Coffee. Bagel. Cake in the oven by 8:45. Cruise over to Staples for the ink. - No. I don't want a fucking Rewards Card! - Cake out of oven. Accountant at 10:30 - preceded by the scramble to find receipts and other 'official tax' documents known by a letter and some numbers. Glad there are no speed cameras on Dulaney Valley Road! 'Sorry I'm late'. 'Precious: Stop barking!' Back home to walk to dog. Peruse America's Test Kitchen Cookbook 'Let's do takeout' section. Walk the dog for the second time to check out house construction down the street. Whole Foods. Mmmm everything. Heaven. 'Have a nice day'...

What the fuck! I walk in the back door thinking, 'Holy shit! I actually fit everything in' - excepting the letter to Aunt Jo, which is fine, because she is old and isn't going anywhere anytime soon anyway, so I can just write it tomorrow (which is, of course, now today, and I still haven't written it). So I unload my reusable bags on the kitchen table, ready to relax and read for an hour or so before beginning to prep dinner, when I walk into the dining room and see red on the floor. Red everywhere.

I would have rather it had been the scene of a massacre, but no. My stupid little adorable but terribly mischievous bitch of a dog. She couldn't have done it BEFORE I leisurely drove through Ruxton en route to Whole Foods to enjoy the beautiful scenery and architecture. That would have been too thoughtful of her. And it is not as though I had omitted her breakfast feeding or hadn't walked her twice prior. She was upstairs sleeping on the futon when I left!

This dog loves cake, and she ate both halves of the Red Velvet cake directly off the dining room table, directly out of the cake rounds from which I had to release them. Table cloth all ruffled up where she, red-pawed, devoured my morning labor.  If she only knew long this day had already been, and how tightly it was scheduled, I truly think she would have abstained. What am I thinking: she is a fucking animal, and loves to eat shit she isn't supposed to.

And as I paced around the house, trying to expel all of the anger and rage and frustration and despondency of realizing my day had just become a little bit longer and that there was no time for 'The Looming Tower', all I could think was, 'I'm going to smoke a fucking cigarette right now. I don't give a shit'. I felt like it was due to me because of the trials I was made to endure on my day off; like an alcoholic thinking, 'It's been a long week. Just one beer'. I immediately ruled out buying a pack because I would either: 1. throw it away after smoking one (or, mostly likely, one on the way home from Royal Farms and one on the deck before re-entering reality), which would be a terrible waste of six bucks and some change; or 2. decide to keep the pack hidden somewhere special for moments just like this - like Johnny Depp's character in 'The Secret Window' - which is a highly improbable situation for a smoker of my ilk. So then I looked outside and realized there were BGE workers standing around an electric pole playing with each other's poles while one fellow fiddled with some wire way up in the sky. 'They would certainly have cigs'...

And then I was out of it. I realized the absurdity of my thoughts and the ridiculousness of the planning I must pursue for five mere minutes of poison and death. I felt like a crackhead. So I came back down to reality, took a deep breath, cleaned up the remnants of my evil dog's delicious feast, and cooked a BANGING dinner.

For scientific purposes, it would seem relevant to note that all that planning and thinking and near destruction of my intentions to quit smoking occurred within about one minute of time. One fucking short minute was all it took to throw this all away. Gotta be strong. The man is always watching...