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Introduction
Sometimes before I go to bed, I decide what I'm going to wear the next day, and then I put the clothes on and sleep in
them so that in the morning I can just get up and leave for work. Mostly I just do that on Thursdays now, because Fridays
are casual days at the office, and it doesn't matter if they get wrinkled, but when I've had other jobs I would sleep in my
clothes every night.
My sister-in-law thought that was disgusting. Most women probably would. At least, they would say it was disgusting,
but probably they would mean it was crude or uncouth, and not disgusting in the same way that you would say it about scabs
or mucous are disgusting. Those things are disgusting in the way that makes you wrinkle your nose and turn away, and make
you queasy and want to hit the person who was talking to you about them, or at least tell them to shut up.
So, I'm crude and uncouth, and maybe even kind of sloppy. At least I'm not dirty and smelly and offensive and rude.
Part I: My New Lightbulbs
My bedroom is usually really messy but I don't like to count that as part of the rest of the house. It's kind of like
my own little dimension, my own Fortress of Solitude. I wonder if Superman keeps his Fortress all neat and clean, or whether
he just leaves crap lying all over the place. I wonder if Lois Lane goes there. Anyway, my bedroom is never neat and clean
and I wonder if people would think its gross.
I took all my lightbulbs out and replaced them with those new swirly-looking ones that are supposed to last like 100
years. It's kind of weird buying lightbulbs that will last longer than I probably will. They're really awesome. When I get
things like this I always think they look like something from the future, and I think how when I was 7 or 8 if someone had
told me that by the year 2006 we would have cities on the moon and cars that fly, I would have believed them, but if they'd
told me that all the lightbulbs would be swirly and last 100 years, I would have thought they were insane.
The bad thing about the lightbulbs is that when you turn on the lightswitch, they don't come on right away. I guess I've
just gotten used to a certain order in the universe: When I pick up a phone I expect to hear a dial tone, when a light turns
green I expect the car in front of me to move, and when I turn on a switch I expect a light to come on. So it's a bit jarring
to turn on a switch and have to wait like .002 seconds for the light to come on.
It's like being in limbo, with the switch and the light and the dark in the room, and for a very brief nanosecond, nothing
makes sense, and I wonder if the power's gone out and if it has, maybe all the power everywhere has gone out forever, like
a giant asteroid has hit the earth or a plague has wiped out three-quarters of the population, and civilization has collapsed.
Then I wonder what will become of me and how I'll manage to provide for my kids in this strange new world of anarchy and lawlessness,
do I have enough food in the basement, and batteries and dry goods and.....
...and then the lights come on.
Part II: Slobbish!
So anyway, with the lights on I can see my bedroom and to me it looks comfortable, like home. At least everything is
right where I left it. Though I'm pretty sure that to most people it looks all messy and thrown together, like that mutant
guy in that one episode of The X-Files who lived under the escalator in a department store and made his nest out of chewed
up newspaper and came out every 30 years to kill people and eat them. Only maybe not quite that gross. And I don't kill people.
It was worse when I used to drink, which I used to do quite often. I don't know that I was ever an alcoholic, but I quit
some years ago. Anyway, now that I'm divorced I don't need to drink anymore.
Once when I was really really little, like 5 or 6 years old, a kid in the neighborhood made up this story about a girl
who became a superhero by screaming "Slobbish!" and then opening her mouth when a big ball of food dropped out of the sky
and she swallowed it and got real fat. It was kind of like Shazam! except much stupider. Which is saying something.
The worst part was that he made up this story about a girl who lived in the neighborhood. He didn't say it to her
face or anything but it burned into my brain so that now whenever I see Captain Marvel or hear the words Shazam or Slobbish,
I think of that. But no one else remembers it, so I wonder if maybe I dreamed it. It would have been a really stupid dream.
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