Up His Nose

...and believe me, he means it.

Greg:

Want to try something that's just nuts? Stick a Q-Tip up your nose. Seriously. That is some freaked out shit. I did it this morning. It was like I'd taken a tiny sheep or a bunny or something and put it on a ramrod and stuck it in my snout. And then my eyes got all watery and my head got all swimmy like I had just sneezed. It's nothing like sticking your finger in there. Q-Tips have no sensory structures - nerve endings and whatnot - like your finger does. You have no clear way to judge how far you put that thing in there until it's way too late. I swear to the Patron Saint of Otorhinolaryngology (...which is Saint Blase. I'm not shitting you. Google it if you don't believe me. -Ed.), I poked myself square in the frontal lobe. I nearly retarded myself by doing it, and it was a retarded thing to do in the first place. Is that what they call a paradox?

But retarded or not, using a Q-Tip is just a great way to clean your nose. Your finger has all kinds of microscopic beasties on it, but a Q-Tip is made from Cherub Down. It's sterile. You could get impetigo or gout or some other eighteenth century disease from picking your nose. Or somebody could bump your elbow and you could inadvertantly self-lobotomize. And don't even get me started on the time that I stuck the vacuum cleaner hose on my beak and nearly collapsed a lung.

You may well ask what I was expecting to accomplish by sticking a Q-Tip up my nose, and I may or may not tell you. But it's a well-known fact that I've been nasally fixated since I was a wee one. Remember how I used to jam cotton in my nose when I was a kid? Jesus Paint-Huffing Christ, you'd think somebody would've called a social worker or something and said, hey, this kid's packing his nose like he's fixing to ship it to China. Maybe there's something wrong with his brain.

Well we both know how that turned out, don't we? I switched from balls of cotton to fistfuls of cocaine, and by my mid-twenties I had turned into a disc jockey. Everyone knows that cocaine is a gateway drug for broadcasting abuse. If I were an adherent of a 12 step program, I might think that this morning's escapade with the Q Tip was a relapse. As it is, I regard it as acting out - a form of stress release, if you will. I've been doing this house-hunting, mortgage-brokering, contractor-wrangling, paint-chip-selecting, Ikea-safari-ing way too long. I can't drink booze any more because I've already proven to everyone within chundering distance that I'm just plain bad at it. So what opportunity do I have to act out my self-destructive-yet-benignly-weird tendencies that seem to bloom when I'm under stress for protracted periods of time?

Speaking of which, Teresa and I were down at Ikea the other day. (You don't say. -Ed.) As is to be expected when a couple is going through something stressful, like - oh I don't know - buying a house, we were sniping and bitching at each other and getting short tempered. And suddenly it dawned on me that nothing, not even buying a house, was worth souring our relationship over. I mean, c'mon, I go around preaching this happiness stuff like my poop was made out of sunshine, and do I remember to practice it when it counts? Well not always, but at least this time I did. So I told Teresa that while I'd been waiting pretty much most of my life to own a house, I'd also spent a good chunk of my life looking for the girl of my dreams. And lo, here she was. I considered myself one lucky Son of the Lineage to have met her. (It's a Buddhist thing. Google it if you don't believe me. -Ed.) But if owning a house meant fighting with the girl of my dreams, it was totally not worth it. In fact, I told her I'd rather lose the earnest money than be unhappy with her. So yeah, we kinda refocused our perspective on this whole house thing. While we feel fortunate to be on the brink of home ownership, the truly important thing is our happiness.

And that's why we're installing morphine-dispensing Tickle Me Elmo dolls in every room of the house.

I kid! I'm a kidder!

Cheers,

-Thaddeus