STOP PLANNING YOUR LIFE
-- Bill Carney
Out of the blue, this woman asked me if I was good in bed. I told her that I was. I wasn't lying. I have always been good in bed. For one thing, I did not do nearly as much smoking and drinking in bed as I might do otherwise. It seemed hard to go wrong in bed.
It was when I got out of bed that trouble started, not because I was looking for it, but because I seemed to lack much sense. This machine lacked any failsafe mechanism. The mystery was how my genes got into the pool in the first place, because by rights, my kind should have been eradicated long ago for being wildly unfit to swim in the genetic froth. Yet, here I was, like one of those Japanese holdovers from the Second World War, who every so many years crawls out of a cave on some remote Pacific atoll wondering what happened. For me, the war also had ended and no one had told me. Fifty years eating nuts and berries, for what.
Privately, I thought I might not be descended from the so-called "Great Apes," and maybe not even the lesser members of simian society. I thought I might somehow be related to those tiny Sea Monkeys creatures you could get in the mail. If a stork could deliver babies, why couldn't the mailman just as easily bring tinier, bulk quantity babies? Just add water.
According to what the "experts" tell us, most people are walking around in a state of practically complete dehydration. Like everything else experts know, nobody knows it, or seems to care. As a result most people are practically hallucinating from lack of water but nevertheless continue whistling dixie and leading arid, clueless lives.
This really struck me. Water, we know, is the most important ingredient for life. It is symbolic of life itself. Curiously, whiskey, the "water of life," tends to dehydrate. In fact, water is the true "water of life." All you had to do was turn on the water faucet and it was right there. If someone was very stupid, they could buy water at the store. They could drink free water. They could drink expensive water. Yet, these same experts say that people are not drinking anything close to the eight cups of water that we should have every day, even where it can be obtained through other things like fruit and vegetables, but not beer and wine.
Collectively, we are failing to maintain the proper water levels in our systems, which are well known for being very watery. To the extent that this is possible, we seem to slap our bodies in the face while they cry out for moisture. Like, if our bodies are from Venus then we (to the extent that we are separate from our bodies) are from Mars. Interestingly enough, although Mars is now a "dry" planet, scientists claim that it was once covered with water-filled canals, just like in Venices, Italy and California, and certain parts of Walt Disney World.
Thinking on all this, I resolved as my strategy for better living to drink more water. A house divided against itself cannot stand, one of our presidents said, and to drink more water was a way of healing this rift between mind and body, psyche and soma.
In this way, I was reminded of the sea monkeys, those creatures that filled so many pleasant hours of my youth. It was no great leap to feel that I was a kind of overgrown sea monkey, swimming in the cosmic brine, and evolving into a more sensible human being, one able to withstand all of the potential pitfalls of each day. Obviously, if I was fully hydrated and others were underhydrated, I would have a big leg up on them each day. I would be the sea monkey able to swim about while they would be merely dried-up, marooned monkeys pathetically squawking on their self-made Monkey Islands of the mind. I lit up a Hav-a-Tampa. I let out a little chuckle. I picked up another cucumber and plastic water jug and started walking to my corner.
And that's when the girl out of the blue asked me if I was good in bed. I was flabbergasted but coolly appraised her. She smiled and her skirt sort of flared out and it was floated up in the breeze caused by the wind tunnel. My heart soared towards the sun on waxen wings as I watched her skirt float higher before she grabbed and straightened it again. I felt I needed some clever retort to seal the deal.
My mind froze on that famous movie still of Marilyn Monroe over the sidewalk grate with the air rushing under her. It occurred to me that Marilyn was in New York, and the subway was supposed to be rushing below the grating, causing her skirt to fly up. There she is, catching her skirt and grinning without a trace of self-consciousness, just enjoying the air rushing along her body. That seemed like the way to go. I was tired of standing on this corner handing out advertising flyers.
So I told her the truth, like I told you, that I was always good in bed, but not much use anywise else. She laughed, saying I was funny. I hoped she meant that in a good way. I was just winging it, thought there was no point in telling her my big plan for righting my life, even if I might eventually have to explain my Poland Springs bottle and sack of cucumbers.
It dawned on me that on a hot day the air from the subway is stale and sweaty and rotten. How could Marilyn like that? Maybe it was another Hollywood con job, but I wanted to believe in Marilyn Monroe, like there was something to it, even if it seemed stale. Or I could just add water.
So I just tossed the flyers and we stopped into the local Kidney Stone for a sandwich and a beer. I felt that maybe my garden was beginning to grow, maybe my luck was changing. If I had been sort of a holy fool before it, was because I believed I still had a chance.