My entry in the "Eligible Bachelor of the Year" essay competition...
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER! This little anecdote in NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM describes its authors usual bedtime ritual or housekeeping habits. Blogger Kevin-M is, in general, a somewhat metrosexual kind of fellow. This heatwave, however, has made him sloppy and languorous...
Last night, I laid in bed for awhile, eating cajun-seasoned popcorn and reading a tacky, sensationalistic true crime novel. Eventually, I felt it was time to go to sleep. Before I could do this, however, I had hygiene activities to attend to: my face needed to be washed, my teeth needed a brushing, and floss needed to be applied. Once this was finished, I was quite thirsty. So, on my way back to my bed, I stopped by my refrigerator for an ice-cold can of Diet Coke. I drank the entire thing while sitting on the edge of my bed, belched twice, and left the empty can sitting on the floor. After brushing the excess cajun seasoning from my sheets, I stretched out and shut my eyes, ready to voyage forth into one of the creepy nightmares that true crime books usually provoke. But it was not to be. Because, as I’m sure you’ve heard a thousand times by now, it’s been pretty hot in the American Middle West recently.
I was prepared for this contingency, however. I yanked off my shirt and walked over to my air conditioning unit, where I flipped the switch from “medium cool” to “excessive cool”. This is a step I don’t normally take, since it causes the device to ramp up from its usual pleasant hum to a sound that suggests a flock of vultures getting sucked into a 747 engine. With this racket filling my apartment, I laid myself down once more. Getting comfortable proved difficult, though. At first, my head was pointing westward. This was all wrong. I quickly re-oriented myself eastward, but found that this afforded me only a paltry twenty minutes of fitful slumber. Clearly, drastic new approaches were in order. First off, I decided that my boxer shorts were bunching up too much, creating an unpleasant and unrestful sensation in my man-area, so I got rid of them. After kicking them away like so much sweaty cotton, I scooted around until my head was pointing northward. This was a radical move, since it had me laying along the shorter axis of the bed with my knees bent and my feet brushing against the floor. It worked, though. Within a few minutes I was unconscious and gape-mouthed on top of my blankets, the wind of my roaring air conditioner blowing my body hair around.
This lasted for about an hour. Then I woke up disoriented, naked, and with a pressing need to pee. A peculiar and obliquely-violent dream was fading back into the recesses of my subconscious as I went stomping into the bathroom. On the way there, I kicked my empty can of soda across the room. Seeing as it was the dead of night (or, more accurately, the dregs of early morning), I felt that I was exempt from having to flush the toilet or wash my hands. I was too busy thinking about the new can of Diet Coke I was going to pop open as soon as all that goddamn urine stopped coming out of me. Cajun seasoning makes me thirsty, you see.
With my second can of soda since beginning the “sleep process” in my fist, I made my way back to my bed. I drank a hearty mouthful of it, left it to sweat a ring on my nightstand, and flopped back across the bed. After a noisy-but-not-at-all-smelly fart, I was back in dreamland. I woke up with my alarm some hours later. By this time, my head was resting not on any of my four pillows, but upon my discarded boxer shorts. After peeling them from my face, I went off in search of some Diet Coke.
The first thing I noticed as I shuffled drowsily around my apartment was that I had left my refrigerator door hanging wide open. “Fuck,” I thought, “I bet this means that my milk is all bad now.” Besides the Diet Coke, my milk is pretty much all my refrigerator usually holds.
For a brief moment, this lapse made me quite angry. Then I picked up my quarter-gallon carton and took a good look at it. When I put it back on the lighted shelf and shut the dangling door, I felt much better.
My milk had gone bad four days ago.
