Let’s All Eat Candy!
Monday, January 22nd, 2007
It dawned on me the other day, while I was driving around town, stuffing my face with a 2-pound bag of red licorice, that I have been thinking about Irony all wrong. You see, if I were to share some of my licorice, say, with the homeless guy at the end of the exit ramp of the freeway, normally I would think that it was ironic that, while I was giving this guy something to eat, something sweet and cherry delicious, it would really just give him an upset stomach, like I received upon finishing the 2-pound bag, and eventually a toothache, that could lead to potential heart failure. Seriously, you can have a heart attack, or worse, a stroke, from bad teeth if they become infected and clog up your arteries. I read it at the dentist’s office, waiting for my root canal procedure to begin. They are not as painful as I had been told but they are uncomfortable as hell, and if you don’t have insurance, even more expensive. Which is why I haven’t been to the doctor to have my broken finger looked at; I don’t have insurance anymore. Which is all my fault, I totally should be insured, but I have problems with paperwork and this is a much longer and far more complicated story than you’d care to hear about. Lesson: create an efficient, yet simple, filing system so that when you break your finger, or do anything to yourself that requires a trip to the Emergency Room, you haven’t misplaced/lost/buried under a pile of TV Guides the renewal forms for your state-subsidized health care, especially when that required visit to the ER is 48 hours after your virtually free health care has expired. Which is a different form of irony, not the Socratic kind, or the Roman version, but more like the garden variety ironic fate sort of thing. “Oh, the Irony is rich,” the future surgeon who repairs my finger will say. He’ll be rolling in it too, and I’m not talking about the irony. The ironyironyironyirony.
Boy was that licorice tasty though. Actually, there was no homeless guy at the end of the exit ramp. But before you completely condemn my credibility, my finger really is broken and you can have a heart failure from bloody gums. Still, I refuse to floss. My most recent goal was to floss every night, after brushing my teeth, IF I wasn’t drunk. So you would think that now that my drinking has dramatically decreased, I would be flossing almost every night. How can I even look myself in the mirror? (I am so good looking.) I also find it odd that it was easier for me to lessen my drinking than it was to increase my flossing. Is that odd? I love drinking more than I hate flossing. Flossing is cheaper, quicker, probably less painful than a hangover, and pays off more in the long run. Now that is some sort of irony.
Why has my drinking habit waned so, you ask? Five big, life-altering words: I am having a baby. Oh yeah. Turns out I am a breeder. A procreator. Baby machine. Daddy. Big daddy. Big daddy love. You may imagine my horror, having never associated myself with the aforementioned titles. Horror and denial. Maybe, it wasn’t mine. Maybe I had just been punk’d. Maybe I was having a flashback to seventh-grade health class, half-heartedly hearing words like “unexpected,” “fertilized,” “egg.” It was as if one moment I am frivolously spitting my days away with a crummy job, in a dingy apartment, driving a shitty van, making regrettable art, plus partying an all-out assualt on my liver; the next, I am being walked through the reproductive process by a pre-natal RN who refuses to end her description of the uterus dropping.
Which brings us back to that tasty twisted treat, licorice. I can’t stop eating it. I buy a pack and it vanishes like a suburbanite from a homeless person at the end of the exit ramp. If you haven’t noticed, they sell it everywhere, the gas station, the drug store, the hardware store, the hospital, the therapist’s office. You’d think I was the prego, nervously gnawing on the red rubber, one after the other, pack after pack, wrappers collecting on the floor of the van like ignored invoices from doctors who just know that, eventually, this dipshit will slip, crashing to the ground, crushing his index finger.
Lesson: I love licorice, safe sex is smart but not that fun and Irony is somehow like dental floss; none of them, broken finger included, will make you feel as good as I do right now.
I am having a baby. Let’s eat some candy!
