04/17/2001

Maury was on, which until a few days ago I hadn’t even realized was still on the air. As a side note, I have to ask – how much of a loser do you have to be, really, to need to be in front of a big audience to tell your mother that you’ve been diagnosed with brain tumors or to tell your mother (different mother and daughter, by the way) that you’ve been prostituting yourself, or to tell your boyfriend that you’ve been boinking his best friend? I mean, you drag me on to Maury to tell me that you’ve been screwing my best friend, I’m thinking there’s less of a chance I’ll forgive you than if you’d told me quietly in the living room. Anyway. So I sat in the waiting room for 45 minutes and the examining room for another 10, and finally the doc showed up, and guess what? That’s right, I have conjunctivitis. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Got the prescription, went to the grocery store, waited around for another 10 minutes to have it filled, wandered around to get the groceries we’d run out of in the three days since Fred got groceries – and had to go back and forth to locate the parmesan, since they’ve remodeled the store since last I was there I couldn’t find the damn stuff – and then went home, dealing with the FUCKING road construction on the way. Once home – it was noon by this point – I dragged the groceries upstairs, put them away and went into the bathroom. This is where the day got especially good. On the bathmat next to the shower, someone – I have my suspicions – had left a nasty little poo-shaped present. I gathered up the bathmat to take down to the washer and heard the very distinctive sound of a retching cat – I passed Spot on the stairs doing his thing. At least it wasn’t on the carpet, that’s all I can say. I kept going past Spot to the washer, next to which is the litter box. NEXT to the litter box was another pile of poo. "GODDAMN IT, WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU FUCKING CATS?" I shrieked in a ladylike manner. I put the bathmat in the washer, tossed the pile of poo next to the litter box INTO the litter box, and grabbed a handful of paper towels to clean up the results of Spot’s retchings – a moth and a piece of grass, surrounded by a puddle of bile. Yummy. That’s when I realized what someone had been trying to tell me all morning long, with the goopy eye, the disconnected feeling because I had to wear glasses most of the day, the road construction, the wind that kept blowing off my baseball cap, the long wait in the waiting room, the Maury on TV, the long wait in the grocery store, the confused wanderings around the grocery store, the road construction again, and all the nasty cat-related nastiness. I should have stayed in bed this morning. ]]>