I recently discovered the jacuzzi, and I love it. I fill it up and turn the jets on up all the way and get it really hot. I mean, really really hot. I mean, scalding hot. I mean, so hot that it's like one of those old cartoons and you'd expect a little black guy with a bone in his hair to start chopping up vegetables in the tub with me.

 

And so I sat there a long time just thinking about stuff. Like how great it is that water even comes out of the faucet this hot when a lot of people would consider this torture, or how cats don't ever really seem glad to see you or even much care when you tell them they're bad, or how Elizabeth Montgomery was a total betty but that standing next to Barbara Eden she would have looked like a little boy, or how kids learn math by counting on their fingers and how if there was an alien with 100 fingers he would be really really great at math but the downside of course would be that if there was a show like Sesame Street on their planet it would be all "Sesame Street was brought to you today by the letter B, and by the inverse coeffecient of the square root of pi as it bisects the trilateral angle in this geometric configuration..."

 

Anyway, so after a long time I got out of the tub and went to lay down in the bed and watch a little TV. I would say that I was naked, but I don't want anyone walking around with a picture in their head of me naked. It used to be that if you said the word "naked", you were some kind of philosopher, or you were an evil sinful deviant upon whom the wrath of God was surely about to pour out. But these days when someone says the word "naked", most people react as if you just said you like to put on a dress and call yourself Mary and stand in front of the mirror singing I Feel Pretty which is weird enough even if you're a woman named Mary but even weirder if you're a fat hairy guy named Frank. Either that or they do a little twisted word-association game in their head like "naked, jello, Hooters waitress, hot tub...." Or anyway I don't know that most people do these things but anyway I tend to, and so I don't like to talk about nakedness or nudity or people with no clothes on; it makes me very uncomfortable to do so, but for some reason when something makes me feel uncomfortable or nervous I have this strange need to talk about it, which only makes me more uncomfortable and nervous, which makes it still worse, and pretty soon everyone around me is uncomfortable and embarrassed in the way that you get when you watch someone make an ass out of himself, and they're all kind of slowly backing away from me like they think my head is about to explode. And I kind of feel like John Cusak in that dinner scene of Say Anything, only magnified by like a million times. And I wonder if sometimes this is how it is for the Riddler when he plans all these really great crimes and then has this uncontrollable compulsion to tell Batman all about it in the form of totally simple riddles, and is it just coincidence that Batman is the only one who can catch him or maybe the stories just wouldn't be as interesting if his compulsion was just to give clues to some random guy out of the phonebook who couldn't give a crap.

 

 

Anyway, I won't say I was naked because that might give the impression that I'm one of those free-thinking socialist hippys with no sense of propriety even though I'm totally not one of those even if I was naked.

 

So I got out of this really hot bath (and I mean really really hot) and I have the AC on and I'm watching TV and I may or may not be naked, and I fell asleep. And when I woke up, I was all fevery and fluish and achy. I think it was the combination of the super-hot bath and the AC being on so high, in which case it's totally my fault. Although the TV was also on, so it could have been invisible government ninjas coming into my room through the airwaves, in which case it was totally not my fault.

 

But the point is I totally did get sick and even though I still had to go to the meeting and I still had to work that night, I went home the next morning and went to bed and sweated and had chills and headaches and it totally sucked. And I got up in the evening and peeled off my disgusting sweaty shirt and I thought about how in the old-timey days they would have burned this shirt thinking it was infested with evil spirits. And I could kind of see, sitting there all achy and sweaty, how it might be kind of comforting to burn my shirt and do a kind of voodoo dance around the fire where, again, I may or may not be naked. It seems kind of defiant, like standing up to say, I'm bigger than this illness! I won't be defined by own human frailties and will set my self apart from the expectations of society or those around me! On the other hand, I may just be delusional because I'm starting to sound like a bad episode of Touched By An Angel, except for the naked dancing part. But it did seem strange to me that these old-timey voodoo people would make the connection between burning your clothes and getting better, and yet still have no concept of what germs are. And lucky for us that they did or they all would have died, and no one would be alive today except rats and dogs and gorillas. At any rate, I didn't have the energy or the motivation to burn my shirt, let alone do any kind of dance around it, and anyway I had in this case one thing that those old-timey voodoo folks didn't have, and that is a washing machine. So I took my sweaty disgusting laundry downstairs and then went out to the store to get some soup and some medicine.

 

I started thinking when I got to the store that hardly anyone has a nice butt. You see nice butts on TV and in the movies and magazines all the time, and so maybe you start to think that that's what butts should look like. And maybe they should, but they don't. Most people either have big fat butts or skinny little butts with no shape. And most of the time I don't have any reasons for thinking the things that I think, but this time I did, and it wasn't because I was checking out people's butts, but because I was walking past the peaches and, unless it's lumpy or freakishly mis-shapen, a peach is kind of shaped like a nice butt. And I wondered how come people don't notice that more and walk around saying things like "She has a butt like a peach." Maybe it's because if folks started associating butts with peaches, they wouldn't want to eat peaches so much anymore, and all the peach farmers would go bankrupt. And then I wondered if maybe there wasn't a peach farmer cartel or shadow peach farmer government that has so far prevented this particular turn of phrase from entering the American vernacular. For all I know there actually is such a thing, and they have sophisticated algorithms embedded in worm programs that search the internet for any instance where the words "peach" and "butt" are used together, and now I've been targeted for termination by the peach cartel.

Botanically speaking, cherries aren't berries anyway, although grapes are and, strangely, so are bananas. But that's a little bit of trivia that no one really cares about but that I carry around in my head on the off-chance that it might be useful some kind of how. Like maybe someday I'll be on Jeopardy. Or maybe aliens who look like berries will one day conquer earth and demand that we pay homage to them and their alien voodoo berry-gods only no one knows to include the banana in their pantheon, and for their heresy the people of earth are rounded up and put into gulags, until I show up with a bunch of bananas and save mankind from slavery and eventual annhilation, and even though they'll kill me anyway for refusing to bow to their pagan voodoo banana-god, at least I know that someday when mankind has thrown off the yoke of its alien berry-people oppressors, my name and likeness will long be remembered in schools and churches across the earth.

 

So anyway, I didn't reckon I could go wrong with cherry. I think it's strange that we as a society teach our children that drugs are bad and yet we try to make them all taste like candy. We are so close to having chewable, orange-flavored crack it's not even funny. I drank the cherry stuff anyway, which was terrible, and now I think I'm about to pass out.