I was recently looking through some photos I took in junior high school—photos I probably haven’t seen since they were developed—and came across one of a boy I had a crush on. Back then, he made me weak in the knees, whereas today, he looks like an obnoxious twelve year old. All twelve year olds are obnoxious, so that made coming up with an adjective easier. I was obnoxious; good lord, the few things I can remember from that antediluvian time make me want to bury my head under a pillow. I don’t know when I changed my ways, but the fact that everything before last Friday is a hazy dream gives me plausible deniability. Was I obnoxious this past August? I have no idea. I yelled at someone, but I think that was in July. I don’t even remember starting to yell, I just sort of encountered myself yelling. Hoo boy, wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.
Today was my day off of work, and I spent it working on my business web site and watching reruns of “Project Runway” from the third season, when they must have dragged the casting couch into a psycho ward. Everything looks different in retrospect, and even though I can’t remember who won the challenges, I have some vague sense of the trajectory of their madness before it makes an appearance. I hoped Jeffrey would be retroactively voted off for the dress that made Angela’s sob-sister mother look like Gargamel, like Heidi from the future would appear in a puff of smoke and set things straight. Angela was just the sort of disaster I would encounter myself yelling at one of these Julys, but she was not as bad as I remembered, whereas Robert and Kayne were a hundred times worse, and it was amusing to see Vincent get even kookier when he realized he had risked his entire future to enter a competition where he was out of his league.
Wait, who are these people and why did I sit on the couch all day watching their every move? I don’t know, it was just an impulse. I feel gross and bloated since my demon lungs have forbidden me to go to the gym. “Do not go to the gym,” said my demon lungs. “Or else.”
“Eat that whole bag of corn chips,” my demon stomach chimed in. "Or else."
As my acupuncturist always says to honor what my body is telling me, I suspect I do not have to paint the rest of this picture.
