The Money

     I make the money.  Not the money you think of first, the obvious money.  They wouldn't need me for that.

     When I worked at the local newspaper, I gathered up the misprints, the ones that ran before they stopped the press, and sold them for three bucks a pop, which is a killing.  Misprints like, “Spacious 2br apt, enclosed patio with huge dick,” and “Mayor outlaws unleashed poets,” and “Local Lesbians Come out to Audition.”  That last one ran lede-story on Sunday.  One thousand papers and I sold them all.

     At the energy company, I collected fraction-watts, those bits of kinetic energy that find themselves in limbo; did you know that 99/100^th of a cent's worth of wattage may be legally repossessed.  I sucked those right back through their copper wires at the end of every month, and at a half a million units, those almost-pennies add up quick.

     I've even went to work for you from time to time, picking up the vestiges of moments we once had--the florescent bulb gleam in your eye like the moonlit gleam the night we made love on the beach, the gritty sand, the stabbing grass, the tiny crabs scurrying--or an almost-smile as you talk on your cell phone, our son scurrying out of your new Lexus SUV, that reminds me so much of our wedding day.

     If I gather up these almost-moments, these sweet nothings, will they add up to something real again?  Something like love?

One Week

I have had a headache for one whole-week.  Not four quarter-weeks with three reprieves of a few days.  Nor even two half-weeks with one reprieve of a few hours.  No, I have had a single headache, unremittingly, for the length of one week.

     Things I have done to alleviate it:  take aspirin, ibuprofen, antihistamines, meth-amphetamines, placebos, sea salt, salt water saline, salt water taffy, I have watched Bugs Bunny and Daffy (the old switcheroo episodes) and old-fashioned Coke commercials, I have worked out, been lazy, watched the filmographies of Martin Scorsese and Patrick Swayze, toggling back and forth, until I went crazy, I tried wearing my heart on my sleeve, saving face, eating crow, beating a dead horse, looking a gift horse in the mouth, horsing around, being the horse about town in a one horse town, being a clown, and when all else failed I passed a health care bill in Congress which only raised the cost of my various ineffective methods.

     It has only been a week and already I've run out of medicine, pop culture references and cleverly used idioms.  If it does not slacken soon, I shall be crazier than a rat in a shit house.  I shall have bats in my belfry, be as nutty as a fruitcake, as mad as a morbidly obese woman at a salad bar, be pushing my bed-slippers across the gritty linoleum of Wonderland, tinkered in my thinkered, bothered in my nothered, the local chairman of your third party branch, the life coach of Kanye West...in other words, I shall be hitherto unwell in my head.

Joking

     I don't care much for Joking, which is not to say that I don't care at all for Joking, just that I don't care much.  I would say, if I had to say, that I care for Joking about as much as I care for a cousin, not a close cousin, one I have a genuine friendship with, but rather one for whom I feel the perfunctory kind of love that one must feel for family, no matter how trivial the connection is.  I don't ask my uncles or aunts about him, but when they mention his new job or new wife, I nod politely as if I care a great deal for Joking and all of his affairs.  If a bus were charging recklessly towards him while he bent over to tie a shoelace, I would not push him out of the way, would not sacrifice myself like that, but when, at his funeral I said, “Why, oh why, didn't I push him out of the way?” I would be propounding it honestly, because I really do wish that I cared more, that I cared more Joking.  Mostly, he just makes me feel inadequate, like I have a heart of stone.  So, I hope you understand my ambivalence towards Joking, and why I cannot laugh at your dreadful puns.