Today was Pretty Fun

Life is a meat grinder. It is mindless repetition performed in the total absence of stimulation. It is an unsavory meal that you force down your gullet one 24-hour bite at a time because your stomach demands it. Life sucks.

Every now and then, though, a bite tastes pretty good. I took vacation today not because I had to, not because I necessarily wanted to, but because I didn't have any better use for it. Mrs. DMG and I dropped Donald off for his first day of first grade, and then went to a little dive we discovered in Bentonville where we killed fifty dollars worth of Korean barbecue just to watch it die. Then we went to Rush Running to try on the "crazy shoes" they had just gotten in. Might buy a pair someday. After that, we picked Donald up from school, dropped him off at therapy, and then had a little dessert date at Steak-n-Shake. After bringing Donald home, I went out again to Walmart for a six-pack of beer--Heineken--a treat that I only enjoy a few times a year anymore. We put our tired kid to bed and each enjoyed a cocktail as we watched a cable TV show about a couple who had to decide between remodeling their current extravagant home or buying a different extravagant home. I won't say what Mrs. DMG and I were doing between dropping Donald off at school and departing for the Korean barbecue place, but it was pretty fun, too.

After such a day, after such a delicious bite of life, you'd think I'd be able to sleep. I can't, though, because my being has a task to do. It is neither a physical task nor a mental task; it is simply something that must be done because my stomach demands it. That task is to pick something to occupy myself for the next several days--something to distract me from the long string of foul and unfulfilling bites I will have to eat until circumstance grants me another day like today.

I think I'll write a suicide note. Not for me, of course. My life is not that bad. It would be a purely hypothetical suicide note, an exercise in composition. I will imagine sentences like, "My memoirs are written on the sunken skin of my face, and there is no more room to write." I will repeat those sentences in my mind over and over again, changing a word here and there like a painter who is never quite satisfied with his work and keeps painting over it. It's not fun, thinking of suicide in the third person all day, but when the grind of your life requires no thought, the mind must do something. Thinking of suicide, abstractly, of course, has gotten me through many a day. So yes! I will write a suicide note. With that settled, with my task chosen and my stomach settled, perhaps now I can get to sleep.

Still, today was pretty fun.