Or...You're Only As Strong As Your Worst Habits. So choose your bad habits wisely.
The amazing, evil caramel chocolate walnut brownie just materialized in our refrigerator overnight. I'm not making this up. Suddenly, it was just THERE, strategically situated, in the middle of the middle shelf, virtually impossible to ignore.
I didn't buy it, and the only other possible culprit was safely asleep and snoring gently. Lucky guy. Anyone else I'd have up pulled up by the pajama lapels, demanding answers. As of yet, my eight year old has demonstrated no nocturnal wandering patterns, much less any capability of getting one of the Maximas out of the garage at night and making a run to the all night convenience store on Pico Boulevard.
So, it was just me and the brownie, in a standoff. But it was no contest. Wasn't just ANY old brownie. The dark caramel on this one was a couple of millimeters thick. The dark chocolate was Black Hole dense. I'm not even sure there was any cake in there. Maybe the baker decided too much cake would be superfluous. And the walnuts, they were just ridiculously huge, like grown too close to the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant huge. Any second, I was expecting that old guy from the Miracle Gro commercials to step out of the shadows, help himself to a glass of milk and ask, 'Are you going to eat all of that?'
And yes, I'm ignoring that crack you just made about the big walnuts and your thinking that this was just some warm and wet between my thighs dream. Real brownie damn it. I kept the plate and the crumbs and a smear of that dark chocolate on it. It was still there, mute evidence, this morning.
Oh yes, I ate it. It was not to be denied. A brownie like that also takes a LOT of milk to wash it down. I must have had three glasses. All pretense of the diet out of the window. Tried the 36D bra this morning that was still too loose to wear just a couple of months ago and, this morning, it fit. One last defeat before the end of the year in which I lost my mom, my freedom, the last little shred of my innocense, and walked completely unprepared into the 14-year single parent commitment of raising my little brother at least through the age of 22.
Oh, and also the year in which I began to doubt whether any of this was good for Roy. He's been the usual rock of strength and stability, and Julian and he have really taken to one another. But the thing about males playing these roles is that it is often hard to know exactly what is going on inside.
Unable to sleep and feeling flushed from a calcium, niacin and sugar rush, padding around my house naked, I eventually turned to my old standby, the BBC World Service Radio Online. Funny thing about the Brits, those close genetic links that my Irish ancestors kept trying to wipe off the face of the earth, and vice versa. They used to own so much of the world ('The sun never sets on the British Empire') that they apparently feel some paternalistic need to still cover the place journalistically as if they still owned it. No one covers everything better than they do.
Per usual, I began to feel a lot less afflicted, and a lot less unlucky. The list of people who were definitely, probably or at least possibly having much worse nights than me was long indeed.
Charles Barkley somehow figured that someone as large as an ex-NBA power forward, in whatever vehicle is large enough to hold him, could weave home drunk last night and not get pulled over. Wrong.
The hockey player and the teen mom chose a name for the grandson of the wannabe vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. The poor kid will get to walk around elementary school with the name "Tripp Johnston." Why they didn't just name him "Kick Me johnston" is unclear, but perhaps this is what you get when you have uncles named "Track" and "Trig."
Kevin Bacon, the latest to be revealed as another one hoodwinked by Bernie Madoff's $50 billion financial swindle, will be starring in a new movie entitled "Six Degrees of Separation From Your Money."
All over the world, thousands of 30-gig Microsoft Zune digital media players began locking up and dying because of something called the Z2K9 glitch, finally exposing what Steve Jobs has been up to during these past several weeks of hiding out.
Matt Dillon figured he could zoom through Newbury, Vt. at 2 a.m. in the morning doing 106 miles per hour in a rented 2009 Chevy Impala. Wrong. We've been to Newbury. Only folks awake there at that hour are the police and state troopers who earn less in one year than Dillon makes on one episode of Entourage.
Somewhere outside Detroit, a GM executive sprang awake in a cold sweat, thinking that his boss should have chosen the Impala instead of the hybrid when he drove to Washington to ask for a multibillion federal bailout.
And, on a serious note, other parents in Colombia, Peru, Somalia, Angola, the Congo, Zimbabwe, The Gaza Strip, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Burundi, Uganda, Sudan, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Burma and other conflict ridden places or areas smouldering on the brink of such conflict too numerous to mention here were probably just hoping to get through the night in some semblance of peace and quiet.
Me? I lost a faceoff with a brownie. I looked in on my little boy, sleeping peacefully. I went to bed, and fell fast asleep.