I have a pretty major announcement to make today. Don’t worry — it’s happy news, and as I prepare to embark on a lifetime commitment with the one I love, I want to share my happiness with you, the Tomato Nation reader.

I’ve decided to get married.

To coffee.

What? Seriously. Every element of a love song — the I love yous, the I can’t live without yous, the you make my life completes and the wind beneath my wingses — is how I feel about coffee, and I’ve never felt it more profoundly than I do today.

It’s time for declare my enduring love for coffee in front of God and the world.

In other news, I need a nap that lasts until Christmas…of 2005. Because zzzz.

I seem to have descended into a vicious circle wherein I don’t get enough sleep because I have so much to do, so I lie awake worrying about how much I have to do, and about not sleeping enough, and about how I’ll never get it all done when I feel so tired, and on and on it goes. Eventually, I get sleepy, and then, just as I prepare to disembark from the train to the Land of Nod…the cats.

So I lie awake, serenaded by the melodious sounds of bored meowing and feline molars scraping across the surface of a 1984 nickel (don’t ask), and I worry, and I wonder about things.

I wonder why Little Joe is chewing on a nickel. I wonder why I bother wondering about that, since Little Joe will eat and/or play with anything that isn’t nailed down, will eat and/or play with most nailed-down items as well, hates me, is crazy, is evil, is crazy-evil, and owes me five cents. I wonder if it’s true what they say about germs on coins. I wonder if I can catch a cold if Little Joe gnaws on a coin and then drinks out of my water glass. I wonder if the 1924 penny I found the other day has germs on it from 1924. What if I get polio from that penny? Or tuberculosis? Or scurvy? I wonder if I should get up and wash my hands, although it’s too late anyway and I obviously already have yellow fever and I shouldn’t go to sleep at all since I’ll wake up dead.

I wonder where the expression “wake up dead” came from.

I wonder what in the hell is wrong with the yippy dog in the high-rise apartment on 34th Street now. I wonder how the acoustics of the neighborhood buildings magically deliver the dog’s frantic and prolonged yipping into my window at all hours of the day and night. I wonder, if the yipping annoys me no end, how the owner of the yipper can stand to coexist with a dog that goes on at least one twenty-minute spree of high-pitched whine-barking a day. I wonder if everyone else in the neighborhood is also lying in the dark, staring angrily at the ceiling and muttering, “If you don’t care that your dog is mentally ill, fine, but at least shut your fucking windows so the rest of us don’t have to deal with it.” I wonder if I should lean out of my own window and threaten to step on the yipper and kill it if its owner doesn’t shut it up. I wonder how many more times it will yip before its hysterical arfing will cease as mysteriously as it began.

I wonder if that “reeeee! ree ree!” noise it makes counts as yipping, or as squealing.

One forty-one…one forty-two…one for– shit, did I skip one thirty-nine? I think I skipped one thirty-nine.

Do I count a howl as three yips or what? And how can nobody have stuffed a potato down that little fuckwad’s throat by now? Shut UP, Yipsey Russell! You made me lose count! Wait. Oh. Crap, I’ve gone insane.

Two twelve…two thirteen…two fourteen…two fifteen…I’m going to kill myself…two seventeen…oh, thank God.

Aaaaand jinxed it. Nice one, Bunting. Crazy and stupid. Great. Two eighteen…two nineteen…two twenty…two…ahhhh. Hello, sleep.

Except…what is Levitra, exactly? It’s an ED drug, right? It’s got to be, or the commercial would just tell us what it does instead of getting all cute with the things-going-through-holes imagery. So if Levitra is so great, why is that guy dorking around in the backyard and doing The Smirky Jig Of Tumescent Pigskin Metaphors? Because I don’t think his wife cares how well he can aim a football, under the circumstances, but then she’s all beaming fondly at him, like, he’s a man again because he can throw a football! Yay! Except shut up, newly bonered football-throwing man and his missing-the-point wife.

If you make a big mess painting a floor and get paint all over yourself, and you can’t get the paint off your fingernails because your cute turtle nail brush ran away from home, can the paint seep into your bloodstream through your cuticles and kill you? Or does just it slowly drive you mad?

Why did I think I could write an entire novel in a month? Should I just give up now? What if I can’t finish it? What if it’s stupid? Because it’s stupid for sure, but if it’s stupid in a “daffy, but marketable, roman a clef for the new millennium” kind of way, I’ll keep going, but I can’t really tell if a climactic scene in which the heroine bashes a fellow mini-golfer over the head with a watermelon says “daffy, but marketable, hilarity involving large fruits” or “trying too hard to seem wacky,” and even if it’s the latter, I already introduced the mini-golf and the watermelon and I can’t go back and change it or I’ll never get the damn thing done. Also, I have to do research on whether the watermelon would break open when it hit the mini-golfer’s head or just sort of bonk the mini-golfer into submission, which I won’t remember to do tomorrow, but if I get up now to write it down, it’ll take me another ten minutes to get to sleep, which is time I can’t really afford to waste.

Speaking of things I need to write down, I need milk. But I wonder — when the side of the Parmalat container says that it’s good for ten days, does it mean ten days after you bought it, or ten days after you opened it? Can’t the Parmalat people just put a date on the side? Because, what, I remember when I opened a thingie of milk? It’s not like losing your virginity; it’s milk. Same thing with baking soda. Can’t Arm & Hammer just install a little transmitter that peeps when it’s time for a new box? Who actually writes the date in the little space on the side and then remembers to check it?

Do people…do that?

Oh, God. People do do that, don’t they? People totally do that. Everyone in the world totally, totally does that except me. Everyone in the world has their household freshening system completely coordinated except me. I never know how to do anything! I can’t put up shelving, I can’t change a tire unless I have a whole day to figure it out, I can’t put on eyeliner correctly — I can’t even paint a floor without looking like I murdered a Smurf with my bare hands! I’m going to die of paint-poisoning psychosis before I figure out what “escrow” means. I mean, I kind of understand what it means, basically, in the sense that I don’t think it’s a special kind of crow or anything like that — not that anyone in their right mind would sell me a house anyway. “Oh, my — what clever vegetable-patterned socks you have on! Mortgage approved, grown woman who dresses like a four-year-old and makes up stupid stories about assault with a deadly melon! Enjoy continuing to hang pictures crookedly in your brand-new home!” Yeah, right.

Oh, super. Yay. Two twenty-one. I hate that goddamn dog so goddamn much that if I looked at it right now it would burst into goddamn flames. Two twenty-two, three, four, and five. And six. And two twenty-seven. And hate. And rage.

And now I’m hungry. Now, should I get up and eat a cookie, even though I know I’ll have crazy dreams because I ate before going to sleep and what I really want is a Brie-and-watercress on a baguette with champagne mustard anyway? Or should I just stay here and fantasize until I fall asleep about sandwiches I wish I could order from a giant menu on the internet and receive via pneumatic tube? And whatever happened to the bright Jetsons-y future filled with pneumatic tubing that the fifties had planned for us, anyway? Shouldn’t we live in a getting-sucked-from-place-to-place world of shiny convenience by now, free of pesky fellow passengers and any actual walking, climbing of stairs, or other effort on my part? Shouldn’t we all be doing a lot less sitting in traffic and waiting for trains, and a lot more whooshing and whizzing?

It’s only technically going crazy if you don’t know you’re going crazy, right? Because if you know you’re going crazy, it’s probably just an anxiety attzzzzz.

Okay, who changed the station on the alarm clock? Seriously. Because cats love NPR. Hobey?

November 3, 2003

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