"It is impossible to put TOO MUCH mustard on it," I announced proudly to my waitress. I was comatose and frozen in yet another eating dream, but not frozen enough because I'm certain that, had anyone else been awake and in the room, he or she would have recoiled in horror at my nauseating chewing, drooling, popping, and swallowing, all of which was necessary to properly ravish my dream sandwich. Hopefully, those in attendance would have had the foresight to film it and put it on YouTube so we could all laugh until we snorted or peed, or both.
But this time I was alone with my pillow, a sensational fluffy wonder which I loved, and not always in the platonic sense, and I arose, showered, dressed, and ate half a banana before my mind arrived at full-to-partly-conscious, as is my daily routine. A minor hangover, a chill traversing my shoulder blades, and my vehicle at the ready, had each promised to transport me to my office without incident.
"Without incident" is an odd brace of words, considering everything that can be spoken of is sure to be an "incident" of some kind, and I have never cared for the term, "destiny." "Funny-haha" is also so closely aligned with "funny-strange" that I am irked when they are used dichotomously. These imperative semantic dilemmas cluttered the halls of my cerebrum, and I took to the streets sucking coffee, applying makeup, and road-texting on the importance of restaurants and booty calls and traffic in the downtown area. It was then that my destiny met with incident in the form of a grizzled labrador retriever.
I am not going to cascade entirely through, over, and under the unkempt fencing of my existential belief system and pretend that I didn't see the animal before I shortened his life. I was granted a few seconds to respond, but I was anesthetized by his likeness to a mountain lion, with stringy, well-versed muscles, and his lowered gait as if a beast in pre-pounce. I am also not going to admit to taking much of his life, considering his advanced age and the fact that he was clearly at a stage where committing suicide was his only and last resort.
I pulled over, and in untempered panic vomited my dream sandwich on the side of the road. My legs propelled me toward the carcass, and I found the warm canine frame in my arms. My body, uninformed by reason, carried him to the ingress of the nearest home, placed him gently on the grass, rotated, advanced, entered my vehicle, and drove away.
I rationalized that he crossed the rainbow bridge before I touched him, that he was stiffening and cold as I laid him in the yard, and that his eyes were glassed, his tender young benefactors secretly delighted and respectfully requesting a new puppy, a brown one this time, with long hair, a dachshund that could follow them to school and that would be too short-legged to hump their friends' bitches and shame them to tears.
Evening arrived and my discomfort ebbed but did not resolve, and so in predictable response I quaffed three glasses of Tempranillo and made passionate love to my pillow. So soft, like a new puppy, but breathless.
Ava Joe is the Queen of Hearts, and thusly, gin. Bet you thought you had that one, eh?
Archived at http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/flash/163-aj-0310-dream and shortlinked at http://frsh.in/95
