It’s Monday. It’s the first day of the week. It’s early afternoon on the first day of the week, and already I desperately need a nap, if by “a nap” I actually mean “to hibernate in a rigidly climate-controlled, humidity-free, pitch-dark basement room for the next two and a half months, awakening only occasionally to enjoy an ice-cold carbonated beverage, and perhaps a semi-nude dash through a thoughtfully-provided sprinkler, before returning to my king-sized water bed filled with lavender-scented shaved ice and submerging myself in yet another dream about George Clooney in which he’s wearing an extremely brief pair of swim trunks crafted cleverly from frozen aloe vera gel and fanning me with a palm frond the size of downtown Minneapolis as we float on a chunk of iceberg in the frozen Arctic sea.” Only fourteen hours into July, and I’ve completely and utterly had it with summer. HAD IT, people.

I imagine the fact that I spent a good two of those hours getting into a Dynasty-level quarrel with my hair is contributing significantly to my heat-related ennui, not least because, had said quarrel actually taken place on Dynasty, I would have had the pleasure of plunging my shrieking follicles into a swimming pool, but no, my hair denied me even that tiny satisfaction, pretending to submit happily to the customary shampooing and conditioning while rubbing its teeny hands together and cackling quietly, but not so quietly that I couldn’t HEAR it, because THAT would show some RESPECT for me, but OH NO, I had to stand there brushing my teeth and listening to a part of my OWN BODY unrolling a tiny set of PLANS and chewing on a CIGAR and referring to “Operation Frizz” from inside the towel, TAUNTING ME with an audible Guy-Fawkesian conspiracy to look like a snarled-up clot of something the butler plunged out of the toilet at Vidal Sassoon’s country house and forcing me to slap it with a layer of pre-emptive gel so thick that, somewhere in Europe, the lead singer of Flock of Seagulls fell to his knees and howled, “NOOOOOOOOOO!” while shaking his fists at the sky, and it didn’t even WORK, because my hair had counted on the gel and promptly coiled up into crunchy ringlets as a counter-strike, so I lined up every barrette, hair clip, elastic band, paper clip, staple, fork, and roll of tape in the house, turned on all the lights, informed my hair in my most Patrick Swayze tone of voice that it’s my way or the highway, and began affixing my hair to my head with all the weapons at my disposal, and I look like the unholy union of Karen Grassle from Little House on the Prairie, Simon Le Bon, and an out-of-service electrical switching station in South Jersey that’s completely overgrown with weeds, except uglier, and I just wrote a run-on sentence unrivalled in all of Dickens ABOUT MY GODDAMN HAIR.

Which, it bears repeating, looks like crap. In fact, actual crap doesn’t look as much like crap as my hair does right now. I considered shaping actual crap into a hairstyle on my head to improve the way it looked, people.

“So why don’t you just blow-dry it”? “SO WHY DON’T YOU JUST BLOW-DRY IT”? Have you LOST your MIND? Well, I’ll TELL you why I don’t “just blow-dry it,” buddy. I don’t “just blow-dry it” because the “blow” in “blow-dry” involves air of THE HOT VARIETY. Air of the hot variety inspires my head to sweat. When my head sweats, my hair gets damp. When my hair gets damp, it frizzes. So, when I blow-dry my hair in the summertime, I have straight hair from the ears down, and frizzy hair from the ears up, and as amusing as YOU might find it, in theory, to look like a standard poodle composed entirely of STYROFOAM PEANUTS, I can assure you that in practice such a look simply WILL NOT DO AT ALL, NO, NOT ONE BIT, not even for RICHARD MARX, and I can ALSO assure you that, even on the rare occasions when I turn the air conditioning up to “Yukon winter” and thereby circumvent the head-sweats, any style or straightness I temporarily manage to impose upon my hair promptly curls up into a dreadful simulation of a Little Bo Peep coif as conceived by the legally blind costume designer of a regional theater company IN HELL, and I possess neither the sheep nor the crook required to play such a part. Furthermore, I could save myself a great deal of time and effort and achieve the same look by telephoning a medical supply company, purchasing an ass, and POSITIONING THE CHEEKS ON MY HEAD.

And don’t give me that “just don’t go out,” either, because I have to go out. I have to go out into weather that — well, I’ve never actually tried to swim through a vat of oatmeal with weighted boots on and a rotten fish clenched in my teeth, but I’ve got a pretty good idea what it’s like, except that the conjectural vat would probably contain a lot fewer stupid people standing in line at the Yucky Oatmeal Station post office on the very first day of a postage increase and wondering aloud how on earth the stamp machines could possibly have run out of three-cent stamps, because it’s not like EVERYONE NEEDS THE THREE-CENT STAMPS NOW, and it’s CERTAINLY not like the post office posted signs to that effect TWO WEEKS AGO so that we wouldn’t all wind up on line for an hour with BOTH THUMBS UP OUR BUTTS, right? Oh, wait. My mistake. Everyone DOES need those stamps now, and the post office made that CRYSTAL clear QUITE A WHILE AGO, so instead of milling about in the foyer like retarded cattle and letting every molecule of air conditioning in the place escape onto 34th Street, why don’t you come inside, get on line, and DEAL, because if I must appear in public WITH A HUMAN ASS ON MY HEAD, I would like to do so in the presence of effective air conditioning.

And if anyone would care to explain to me how the cats, who have FUR, have somehow utterly FAILED to grasp the concept that hot weather and snuggling DO NOT GO TOGETHER, please feel free, because I really do not understand why they feel compelled to LIE ON MY LEGS when they have spent the bulk of the day whining and flopping melodramatically around in the bathtub because of the heat, heat also given off BY ME. I mean, I can see how spreading out like little area rugs would maximize their coolness, but I do not get how spreading out like little area rugs ON TOP OF ANOTHER LIVING CREATURE achieves that end, especially when the living creature in question has asked them very nicely to GET OFF OF HER FOR GOD’S SAKE, BECAUSE SHE HAS A HUMAN ASS ON HER HEAD, and I don’t know what you’ve read, but as far as kicky chapeaus go, the ones fashioned from butt cheeks DON’T REALLY BREATHE.

Nor can I just run the AC twenty-four-seven and have done with it, because my air conditioner is gigantic, and every time I turn it on, Con Ed runs a credit check, so I try to delay turning it on until the last possible moment, and not until I can’t type anymore because even my fingernails have begun sweating and the seven Otter Pops I stuffed down my pants at lunchtime have melted do I finally give in and turn on The Behemoth, because The Behemoth should have one of those national-debt clocks affixed to the front, and The Behemoth does not know “cool.” The Behemoth knows only “bone-achingly cold,” which has things to recommend it; it allows the usually-intolerable snuggling with the cats, for example, and it cuts the sweat factor on a can of Diet Coke way down. On the other hand, a cat with blue lips is a terrifying sight to wake up to first thing in the morning. I didn’t even know cats HAD lips.

I also didn’t know that circumstances existed under which my felines would note a pile of fresh laundry and sulk away in the opposite direction, but when it’s hot, the cats walk up to the laundry, look at me all “we just…can’t right now, sorry,” and flop down sadly next to it, and BOY, can I relate. Because I won the sweat glands of a farmhand in the genetic lottery, summer creates MORE laundry while proportionally reducing my already minuscule desire to DEAL with said laundry, and visits to the laundry room don’t do much to cut down on the sweating. The boiler room of a German U-boat is a breezy mountain aerie in comparison. So, you go to the laundry room. And you launder. And you sweat. And the airborne lint sticks to your sweaty skin and clogs your pores. And then you die of clogged-pore lint poisoning and your mother can’t even give you an open-casket funeral because you have a pair of buttocks on your head.

I don’t think I can take much more. The heat alone, okay. The heat AND the humidity, well, all right. The heat and the humidity AND the shitty hair AND the pit-stains that go all the way around and meet on my back AND the cats draped on my legs AND filing bankruptcy to pay for the AC? No. No, no, no, no, no. I can’t take it. It’s too hot to eat. It’s too hot to smoke. It’s too hot to think, it’s too hot to walk, I’ve eaten so many Frozfruits that my left foot turned into a giant strawberry, the air weighs more than Elvis and smells worse, every time I shave my legs one of the cats licks the little curl of shaving cream off of the nozzle and starts sneezing and howling and running angrily around with a giant tail, so then the OTHER one has to run angrily around with a giant tail ALSO and shed everywhere and bonk into the one leg I have on the ground and nearly knock me over, and after nearly twenty years of shaving my legs NEVER, not ONCE, have I NOT left a little mohawk on my knee and the whole city smells like boiled vomit and I HAVE A BUTT FOR A HEAD.

Maybe, if I stopped screaming…? No. No, I’ve already started screaming, which means I’ve already started SWEATING, which means that the cats have come to hover around my legs and driving me BAZOO by rubbing AGAINST me and leaving TAIL HAIR sticking to the sweat behind my KNEES, and besides, Regina hasn’t written an entry since Jimmy CARTER lived in the White House, so SOMEONE has to hit “caps lock” around here or what’s the world COMING to, and by the way, WHAT is with the goddamn DOMAIN-NAME STEALING around here? First Omar, then Regina, now Gwentown’s gotten hijacked? Think up your OWN clever domain names, ASSHOLES, because nobody likes adding a hyphen, NOBODY, and if ANYONE steals the Tomato Nation domain name and forces me to stuff a stupid hyphen in there, adding a keystroke and unnecessarily complicating everyone’s lives, I will go to his house, I will ring the doorbell at dinnertime, and I will scare the crap out of his kids and send them screaming into years of post-traumatic-stress therapy just by standing on the doorstep with a creepy smile on my face because, in case you’ve forgotten, I’VE GOT AN ASS ON MY HEAD AND IT’S REALLY QUITE SCARY, so don’t MAKE me come OVER there. Yeah, THAT’S right. If you think you can comfort your children when they wake up from nightmares screaming “MOMMY MOMMY THE BUTTHEAD LADY WANTS TO KIIIIIIILL MEEEEE,” well, THINK AGAIN.

And seeing as how I haven’t fainted from exertion yet, you’d better believe there’s MORE YELLING AHEAD, ladies and gentlemen, because I CANNOT ABIDE that STUPID Sunday New York Times commercial that FOLLOWS me from channel to channel ALL DAY no matter WHAT I WATCH, and I would like to take this opportunity to inform the MORON who says that the only thing she likes better than DOING the crossword is actually FINISHING IT that, for those of us with opposable thumbs, “DOING” THE CROSSWORD IS FINISHING IT, OKAY? Done and finished ARE SYNONYMS. If you STARTED the crossword, but did not FINISH it, by which I mean that you left some of the SPACES BLANK, and you probably filled it in in PENCIL like a WIMP — and don’t EVEN write me all “I do the crossword in pencil and there’s nothing wrong with it,” like, it’s a CROSSWORD, not your LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT, sack up and USE A PEN, so you screw up, SO WHAT, it’s JUST A CROSSWORD, why not LIVE A LITTLE BEFORE YOU DIE, but ANYWAY — if you didn’t FINISH the CROSSWORD, then the CROSSWORD is not in fact “DONE.” It is INCOMPLETE. So, you see, you did not DO the crossword, but merely BEGAN IT, because if you did not finish it, YOU DID NOT DO IT EITHER, and that ad has bugged the SHIT out of me for YEARS now and I really felt I had to say something.

Wow, I’ve got a pretty good tizzy going here. Anything else to yell about? Hmm. No, not really. Oh, wait, one more thing. Rold Gold Honey Mustard Tiny Twists? NOT GOOD AT ALL. I really looked forward to snacking on those, AND THEN THEY KIND OF SUCKED, which is worse than really sucking, in a way, because at least if something really sucks, it’s memorable, but these pretzels suck so weakly that I KEEP FORGETTING I HAVEN’T FINISHED THEM, and excuse me, but I JUST put on this toenail polish and it’s ALREADY FLAKING OFF, so I have to wonder WHY I spent an HOUR walking around on my HEELS and carefully picking CAT HAIR out of my pedicure when a certain cosmetics corporation that RHYMES WITH “SCHMEV-PON” had absolutely NO intention of creating a nail polish that didn’t SUCK ASS, and SPEAKING of ASS, if my hair DIDN’T look like a pancake that got left out in the rain, dropped off the roof of a seventy-story building, run through a Cuisinart, and stored in Stone Cold Steve Austin’s armpit for a period of sixty days, IT WOULD LOOK LIKE ASS. Ohhhh, wait, HOLD ON JUST A SECOND, my mistake, IT DOES LOOK LIKE ASS!

Clooney? CLOONEY! Put down that palm frond, get over here, AND SHAVE MY HEAD RIGHT NOW!

[whump]

“Welcome to the Fox Ten O’Clock News. And now, a review of our top stories. Local resident Sarah Bunting brandished a Bic razor and verbally abused pedestrians on Madison Avenue for close to an hour today before paramedics brought her to NYU Medical Center, where she was treated for heat exhaustion and lint poisoning. Eyewitnesses say that she begged strangers to shave her head, and repeatedly ranted that her head had turned into a pair of buttocks. Bunting is in stable condition; actor George Clooney, attending a memorial for his aunt Rosemary, had no comment on the incident.”

July 1, 2002

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