Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

sometimes i’m convinced the gods have some plan for me. i’m certain of it.

then there are times i doubt they have any idea what they’re up to, and are just as confused as the rest of us.

take, for instance, a weekend not so long ago as to be completely lost to memory. i had been invited out with a friend. i went. out, i thought, would be a good place to go, since i was visiting out of town, and why stay in when you’re already about as out as you’re going to get?

so out i go. but first, we go to pick up a friend of my friend.

friends have this way of networking, much like cloning or asexual reproduction, whereby one acquires new ones from old ones, but never actually reproduces oneself.

an interesting young lady, in the best sense of the word. interesting, in some contexts, can mean the same thing as ‘dear god, i think it moved’ or, more appropriately, ‘she has a good personality’. but, in this case, interest was piqued.

anyhow, a lovely individual, outspoken, intelligent, witty, charming, all the other stuff people are supposed to be but never are. you know the drill.

but, when, upon returning from coffee and confections, some rogue element of indigestion leaves her writhing on the floor in agony, the rest of us determined to continue on the mission of going out, i am distraught. the gods are playing tom cat to my jerry mouse, holding between overlarge, cartoon-pudgy fingers, my elastic and underappreciated tail. jerry is allowed to run only a few inches before snapping to the end of his tail’s limit, running in place while the sight gag plays out. tom releases the tail, jerry snapped in the arse like the new boy in the locker room caught without his towel.

the gods must wear sandals

some people call them flip-flops, some call them thongs. but, whenever i think ‘thong’ i think of the ass-exposing bathing suit, not footwear. so i call them flip-flops or sandals. you know the kind i’m talking about – the kind with the thingy that runs up between the big toe and the next toe. i guess that would be called the index toe, if that made any sense. it’s odd how we have names for all our fingers, but only our big toe has a name

sure, some people call the last one on the end the ‘little’ toe or the ‘pinky’ toe. but really, pinky is already taken, and ‘big’ and ‘little’ are more descriptors than names. the same, i suppose, could be said of the middle finger, but some people call it the ‘birdie’ finger, or, as stephen king put it ‘yer fuckfinger’. and what of the piggies game, where one piggy has roast beef, and one has none? i suppose we could call one ‘the roast beef toe’ and the ‘none’ toe, but that’s too cumbersome for me, and besides, it’s a matter of much disagreement which end to begin with ‘the shopping toe’ is it the big toe, or the little toe?

for the sake of tradition, let’s leave ‘big’ and ‘little’ alone. but what of the three between?

i, for one, use the big toe and the next one down for picking up and flinging things when walking barefoot. i’m probably more adept than most at this, for reasons i will explain later. the odd rock or shell on the beach, bits of laundry or trash in my apartment. so, i call that the rock-flinging toe, or just the flingin’ toe for short.

the next two toes are, somehow, inexplicably, linked. it’s an odd leftover from amphibian evolution, i suppose. they’re.. webbed. sort of like there was some brief waterfowl incident in our ancestry. makes for better swimmers, i guess. since they’re not much use alone, and i, for one, cen’t move then separately, i’ll call them, collectively, the ducktoes.

well, now that’s settled.

anyhow, on with the original topic of my rant.

i have worn sandals of the flip-flop variety – the kind with the thingy that runs up between your big toe and your flingin’ toe – for years. since i was a very small child. so my feet have an abnormal gap, hence my freakish ability to not only pick up and fling objects, but manipulate them, with my toes.

this is the effect of wearing sandals for prolonged periods of time.

so, when i examine my life, and find that the gods are doing their darnedest to come down on me with their great monty python feet, it always looks like i can find a way out in the gap between the divine big and flingin’ toes.

and so it is that i have survived so far, and not gone completely loopy. or else, maybe i’m wrong, and the black stuff between king kong’s toes actually _is_ natives.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 1999 at 4:00 am and is filed under Old Stuff. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.