Assassination and the Culture Of Life

I'm doing the single thing this week. My partner A. is vacationing in P-Town. She's been gone since last Friday, but we speak to each other twice a day. She calls me in the morning to make sure I've remembered to get up for work, and usually in the evenings to remind me to lock the doors. I'm not completely hopeless on my own, but I've had someone telling me what to do for the last fourteen years, so in the absence of that direction, I usually do....nothing. A. will leave on a business trip for three days, I will usually kiss her goodbye and then sit back on the couch with a cup of coffee and the remote. When A. comes home three days later, I am usually in the same spot with the remote still in my hand, coffee cups and a few beer bottles accumulated on the coffee table, along with an empty plate or two with the remnants of a pepperoni pizza. If there are no clean plates, then I use paper towels. When A. leaves for more than a week, the clutter of coffee mugs and beer bottles become too much even for me, and so I pile them on the counter and in the sink. On the fifth day, I have run out of frozen pizza, so I have to look through the cabinets to find something edible. A. does the food shopping, and we almost always have a good supply of chips and salsa, so for two days, that's what I eat. By day seven, even the crumbs at the bottom of the bag are gone, so I forage through the cabinets (really reaching to the back where there is always an abundance of Forgotten Food) and find some stale graham crackers and apricot jam. Around that time, A. usually calls to tell me her flight time for the next day. Yikes! She's coming home at noon? Tomorrow? In a frenzy, I stay up all night cleaning and taking the trash out, then I sit back on the couch with my coffee, in the same place she left me a week ago.

Having women around constantly telling you what to do, is not always a bad thing. In fact it may be the one thing that keeps the world turning. What might we be without them?

A. called me tonight. The phone rang, and I had to make a lunge over the stack of dirty plates and various beverage containers around me. We exchanged a few words of marital intimacy (pet names and such, it's private okay?) and I filled her in on what was happening in DC in her absence. A. has been living for seven days in a CNN Free Zone and has not heard about the latest Pat Robertson flap. I filled her in on the details.

"Isn't assassination the same thing as killing? Aren't the Christians pro life?", A. was saying. I had dropped my graham cracker and jam sandwich and was trying not to step on it.

"Yeah, I think that's right, they're pro-life except for like dictators. And criminals."

"If his mother had had an abortion, we wouldn't have this problem." A. was in rare form. I laughed, and then opps, stepped on my sandwich.

"Well they really seem to favor pre-emptive action." I said. The phone cord was not really long enough to reach the broom in the kitchen, and I had jam on my shoes, so I couldn't exactly walk across the rug.

"Before they shoot him, tell them to save some stem cells. We might be able to send them to India and find a cure for Alzhiemer's."

"Right."

"My flight comes into National at 2:30 tomorrow."

Tomorrow?

"Honey the other phone is ringing! I gotta go!"

Tomorrow? Okay I totally have to log off NOW!

Does anyone know how to get apricot jam out of the carpet?

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