No sleep lost

There’s something hiding down here. It’s way down deep. It sits underneath silliness, sarcasm and smiles. It never goes away. It’s ever-ready to darken even the brightest of days. It festers and stings. It is relentless. It is shame.

Sitting on top of the shame is reasoning. I draw some comfort from my belief that life has no beginning and no end. I take comfort in silly foreign philosophies and bath in religiosity. Who were you before your parents met? It’s a Japanese koan. Enso! I kid myself. Nothing provides an answer. Nothing provides relief. I feel love, hate, anger and pain but I understand nothing.

It started in a waiting room. I was waiting for my girlfriend. My future wife was seeing the doctor. It was a long wait but I didn’t mind. I was reading one of my favorite magazines. Motor Trend magazine was road testing the Dodge Viper. I wasn’t oblivious to what was going on. We had no choice, I reasoned. It was what had to be done. A doctor was aborting our child less than 100 feet away. I felt no pain. I felt no regret. In fact, I spent some time debating whether the Viper could best a Porsche 911 turbo in a quarter mile. There was no empathy. There was no regret that day. I lost no sleep.

Today is valentines day. Susan is sleeping in and our kids are playing. I hear them in the other room: Bakugan and Bob the Builder. There are tears in my eyes. My heart burns. I want it to hurt. I want to be punished. I want to be free but I know that I am undeserving. Undeserving because I know that this pain, this regret, this love, this humanity is all more than my unborn child had the opportunity to feel.

Live to poop another day

My ringtone is distinctive. It’s the soundtrack from Super Mario Brothers video game. Everybody in the office knows who has that ring tone. It’s a company phone and it’s the coolest one they have. There are only two people in the office that have it.

There are times when receiving a call can be embarrassing. Like Super Mario ringing on airplane, during sex, in a movie theatre, or in the bathroom. All have happened to me. But the last one seems to happen a lot more than it should. I just don’t know why people wait to call until I’m sitting on the John – but they do.

I expect to receive at most 6 or 7 calls at work during the course of an average day. Yet every single time I sit on the John my phone rings! How can this be? I only go once a day! Now, I’m a logical kind of guy. I work with computers. I know for a fact that, statistically, these numbers just don’t make any sense. It’s like I’m cursed by the God of pooping peace or something.

Anyway, yesterday at work proved to be no exception to the rule. I’m sitting there expecting it to ring. Knowing it will ring. I wait for it. I sit on the crapper, check my email and text messages and wait. 10 minutes later, still no call. I put it back in my pocket and get prepared to “get down to business”. Yep, you guessed it…

In a flurry of activity to press the “Ignore” button, I reach for the phone. It’s stuck. I yank it. Hard. Then in maxtric-like slow motion the phone flies up into the air. I grasp wildly, almost falling off the toilet. In an act of pure butter fingers the phone slips through my hands. Thunk! It hits the rim of the toilet and skims along the floor to safety. It even stops ringing! I want to punch the air in celebration! That is, until I hear the next sound. Plink! I open my legs and peek down. The stylus fell in! It’s sitting on the bottom of the crapper. I wanted to cry.

I had lost the urge to poop by now. I had other things on my mind! I retrieved the phone and sat there contemplating just how badly I wanted that stylus. It took seconds for me to reach an answer. Not that bad, I thought.

So I flushed. It didn’t move. I waited and flushed again. And again - Flush! I even bundled a wad of paper and tried flushing that. Nothing. It just sat there looking up at me. So now I was forced to ask myself another question. Did I actually want to leave the stylus in there? Everyone in the office would know that it came from my phone. It’s sculpted stylus perfection. It could only fit one phone. I had no choice. I rolled my sleeves up and dived in!

I’m sure that the complete stranger that saw me walking towards the sink with rolled up sleeves and dripping hands thought that I was quite mad! Thank God for perfect strangers, I thought! Anyway, what did I care? I had the stylus! I’ll live to poop another day, I thought.