Aorta stop eatin' junk food

Dad’s surgery was “smooth and easy” according to the surgeon—who may or may not have been referring to the fact that the hospital shaved my dad from the neck down before they poked him in the aorta—and he’s now recovering/waking up in the recovering/waking up room as we continue to stuff our faces in the waiting room.

You might say he’s on the mendo from his endo. But please don’t. Never say that.

I am 10 months pop-free today

Granted, I’m not over the ambrosial fizziness of bubbly beverages so I’m now living with a three-can-a-day addiction to sparkling water—which is the quién-es-más-macho equivalent of saying I’m living with a three-rainbow-a-day addiction to majestic unicorns—but I’ve successfully broken free from the bonds of pop’s unpronounceable-chemicals elixir soup. And for that I toast myself with my first icy cold can of cherry bubly for the day. ¡Salud! I mean ¡Princess Sparklepony Unicorn!

You know why my day is better than yours?

BECAUSE I HAVE A FRESH BOX OF KLEENEX.

Never mind that it’s off-brand. And that I have a bit of a cold. Those pesky details just ruin my narrative.

Goodnight, Jakey

When you turn down two invitations to post-performance get-togethers because you’re exhausted and in dire need to sleep but you grab an ice-cold sparkling water when you get home and turn on your Roku YouTube channel just to unwind for a few minutes and then you get sucked into a vortex of Vox education videos and Dancing Through My Broadway Résumé profiles and now it’s freaking 4:00 am and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MY SENSE OF GOOD JUDGEMENT but through it all your show hair has stayed faithfully on point.

I just had 5-Hour Energy for breakfast!

I still haven’t taken the left and right labels off my monitors from when my office moved 18 months ago! Peach-pear La Croix tastes like dust and sadness! Let’s ride bikes! Squirrel!

Gah!

It’s not even 10:00 and I’ve already tried to take a drink of soda with the can completely backward, described a solid-color polo as “soiled,” killed a wombat with my bare hands, downed emergency doses of Gabapentin and 5-Hour Energy, and lied about killing a wombat with my bare hands. WHAT’S NEXT, SATAN?

I’m seven months pop-free today!

I credit my success with gallons of wistfully flavored sparkling water and the occasional (OK, almost daily) intravenous 5-Hour Energy.

For the record, I do not claim the beer bottles lying in repose in my empty Klarbrunn box.

Nevermore

This little fella is either cawing proudly or screaming into the existential void of worm-eating avian futility (the windows are double-glazed so it’s hard to hear for sure) as I sit at my desk in comfort sipping blueberry-passionfruit sparkling water and munching on mass-produced chocolates.

Our revels now are ended,

... but not before I stopped by our friendly neighborhood Dick’s Piggly Wiggly (which is apparently now Tammy’s Piggly Wiggly but I’m a Piggly-Wiggly-giggly little middle-schooler so I’m gonna stick with Dick’s) to stock up on klarbrunn—which sounds so European! without garish American capital letters even!—sparking water. (I heartily recommend the blueberry/passionfruit flavor. That is if you can find any; I just bought the entire stock of it.)

Now I’m back on the road with my Broadway podcasts and my cigarette-lighter-radio-broadcast-thingie and my carbs coma and my birdie videos and my happy memories.

And my full tank of gas this time.

Ice-cold Cherry Bubly? Check.

Two freshly homemade pies? Check. Gay-ass Longaberger pie carrier with gay-ass fruit-print ruffled liner? Check. New thingie I just bought to stick in my cigarette lighter and broadcast show tunes and podcasts from my phone to a radio station? Check. A library of more show tunes and podcasts than one person could listen to in five lifetimes? Check.

Full tank of gas to get me to my Galena weekend reunion vacation without having to stop?

Shit.

I’m all stocked up on whisper-of-fruit-burp-flavored not-pop for the week!

But why don’t you have an easy-to-dispense pull-off corner of your box like all other canned beverages in the universe, La Croix? It’s not like you’re spending all your packaging money on flavoring.

Movin' the chains

I’m home from another delightfully exhausting weekend, I have the house quietly to myself and an ice-cold cherry-lime La Croix on a coaster next to me, and I’m going to spend my evening listening to Mozart and reading a book. And being thankful for many, many things.

NEW BIG BAR FOUR GACK!

If anyone wants an expired box of Chef Robert Irvine’s Fit Crunch Baked Whey Protein Bars in confetti-colored birthday-cake flavor that I just found in the bottom of a desk drawer, don’t look at me; there isn’t a person on this planet (with eight or nine exceptions) I’d let choke to death on their unrelenting, not-unsawdustlike vileness.