drinking again. Man, I loved booze. Booze made me feel the way being in a womb must feel. If fetuses aren’t getting alcohol, what, exactly, are they getting in there that makes the womb everybody’s dream vacation spot?
Rick catches his reflection on the freezer’s shiny surface. Uh-oh — my teeth! My teeth are dirty! Leslie Freemont will see my teeth and deem me deficient! Rick, like many people, tends, accurately or not, to blame his teeth for many of the perceived wrongs in his life. He slips into the bathroom and quickly overbrushes his molars, and blood drips into the sink’s chipped white ceramic bowl. Rick rinses out his mouth gunk and returns to the bar. When he sips from a cold cup of coffee, his mouth detects a familiar and undesirable taste: that of cooked liver. Huh? Why am I tasting liver? And then he realizes that what he’s tasting is dead blood cells, which is the reason liver tastes like liver, because the liver is the body’s blood purifying system. This observation amuses Rick, but it also reinforces his practice of not eating any piece of meat that once had a job: livers, kidneys, thymus glands . . . wings. Rick will only eat meat meat. Of course, within Rick’s universe of unemployed meat, hot dogs and hamburgers are exempt from his rule, his thinking being that if you chop up something finely enough and turn it into a geometric shape, it will always become quite palatable.
Rick looks at Karen; her Internet date is clearly tanking. He knows he could put the pair of them out of their misery and discuss the weather with them, but the only way people are going to learn is from their mistakes.
In any event, Rick likes the way he feels right now and wants to keep it going. It feels like Christmas morning. When he woke up this morning, the day felt different than it normally does. Usually, when he opens his eyes, there are a few glorious moments before he remembers who he is, where he is, and what he’s become. And after that he’s Wile E. Coyote, running off the cliff and suddenly realizing he’s going to pancake onto the desert floor below. And this is when his automatic thinking kicks in, the tape loop along the lines of: Maybe I didn’t try hard enough to wake up this morning. If only I was more awake, more alert, I could look closely enough at the world and a magic revelation would be mine — if only I could wake up just that little bit more. Dammit, I spend my whole life looking and looking and looking at the world, but I guarantee it, the moment I move my head away from my patch of ground will be the exact moment the earth cracks open — and if I’d been watching, for just that one second, I’d have seen the core of the planet, molten and white.
But wait — today with Leslie Freemont, I will wake up that extra little bit!
Leslie Freemont will widen Rick’s point of view and make Rick feel good about himself. For example, Leslie says it doesn’t matter where in the universe you are, all emotions are the same, a universal constant — and yes, we as humans get to experience them all. It’s what makes us superior to animals. Leslie is awesome smart. Leslie is like a glamorous train passing through the landscape, people waving at him all the way. Rick, on the other hand, is a bus. People don’t wave at buses. Wait — he’s not even a bus; he’s a stalled car with a flat tire on the side of a gravel road nobody ever uses. And his passenger window is broken and replaced by plastic dry-cleaning bags and clear packing tape.
Rick looks across the bar and witnesses Karen’s misery. Suddenly he feels magnanimous. He takes pity on Karen, with her obviously awkward chit-chat, and decides to mix her another Singapore sling. He looks up the drink in his mixology book and is newly shocked by the list of ingredients; he can’t believe the crap people used to put in their bodies in the twentieth century.
As he mixes the drink, Rick’s thoughts return to Leslie Freemont. Won’t young
Rick catches his reflection on the freezer’s shiny surface. Uh-oh — my teeth! My teeth are dirty! Leslie Freemont will see my teeth and deem me deficient! Rick, like many people, tends, accurately or not, to blame his teeth for many of the perceived wrongs in his life. He slips into the bathroom and quickly overbrushes his molars, and blood drips into the sink’s chipped white ceramic bowl. Rick rinses out his mouth gunk and returns to the bar. When he sips from a cold cup of coffee, his mouth detects a familiar and undesirable taste: that of cooked liver. Huh? Why am I tasting liver? And then he realizes that what he’s tasting is dead blood cells, which is the reason liver tastes like liver, because the liver is the body’s blood purifying system. This observation amuses Rick, but it also reinforces his practice of not eating any piece of meat that once had a job: livers, kidneys, thymus glands . . . wings. Rick will only eat meat meat. Of course, within Rick’s universe of unemployed meat, hot dogs and hamburgers are exempt from his rule, his thinking being that if you chop up something finely enough and turn it into a geometric shape, it will always become quite palatable.
Rick looks at Karen; her Internet date is clearly tanking. He knows he could put the pair of them out of their misery and discuss the weather with them, but the only way people are going to learn is from their mistakes.
In any event, Rick likes the way he feels right now and wants to keep it going. It feels like Christmas morning. When he woke up this morning, the day felt different than it normally does. Usually, when he opens his eyes, there are a few glorious moments before he remembers who he is, where he is, and what he’s become. And after that he’s Wile E. Coyote, running off the cliff and suddenly realizing he’s going to pancake onto the desert floor below. And this is when his automatic thinking kicks in, the tape loop along the lines of: Maybe I didn’t try hard enough to wake up this morning. If only I was more awake, more alert, I could look closely enough at the world and a magic revelation would be mine — if only I could wake up just that little bit more. Dammit, I spend my whole life looking and looking and looking at the world, but I guarantee it, the moment I move my head away from my patch of ground will be the exact moment the earth cracks open — and if I’d been watching, for just that one second, I’d have seen the core of the planet, molten and white.
But wait — today with Leslie Freemont, I will wake up that extra little bit!
Leslie Freemont will widen Rick’s point of view and make Rick feel good about himself. For example, Leslie says it doesn’t matter where in the universe you are, all emotions are the same, a universal constant — and yes, we as humans get to experience them all. It’s what makes us superior to animals. Leslie is awesome smart. Leslie is like a glamorous train passing through the landscape, people waving at him all the way. Rick, on the other hand, is a bus. People don’t wave at buses. Wait — he’s not even a bus; he’s a stalled car with a flat tire on the side of a gravel road nobody ever uses. And his passenger window is broken and replaced by plastic dry-cleaning bags and clear packing tape.
Rick looks across the bar and witnesses Karen’s misery. Suddenly he feels magnanimous. He takes pity on Karen, with her obviously awkward chit-chat, and decides to mix her another Singapore sling. He looks up the drink in his mixology book and is newly shocked by the list of ingredients; he can’t believe the crap people used to put in their bodies in the twentieth century.
As he mixes the drink, Rick’s thoughts return to Leslie Freemont. Won’t young
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