A Quick Essay Having To Do With Nothing

Here's a little sample of a project I've been busy with lately.  Ultimately, this piece wasn't successful but I still think it's decent enough to share.

I’m not normally one for conspiracy theories.  I mean, I don’t doubt the Apollo mission was real.  When Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind, I’m convinced he did so on the moon and not a soundstage in West Hollywood.  

I believe Elvis is neither alive, well, nor patronizing a Burger King in Michigan.  I’m pretty sure most UFO sightings stem from the Heene family’s desire to be on television.  I feel like barcodes are nothing but inventory management keys and I’m willing to wager the biggest secret the Freemasons are keeping is where the keg’s hidden. 

Point?  My closet’s full of hats but none of them are made of aluminum foil.  Yet despite my firm belief most events can be explained by Occam’s Razor, I’m fairly certain people in my life are conspiring to kill me.

I suspected my cleaning women had it out for me when they waxed the pedals on my elliptical machine, turning grippy rubber pads into tiny skating rinks.  (Fortunately, the machine is largely decorative.)  My misgivings were confirmed when I noticed the stairs had been glazed into glass with a hundred coats of Pledge, while my shower floor’s been untouched for so long it should be mowed, not scrubbed.

I have a hunch Jordan, my ancient gray tabby, is in on the plot.  For the past seventeen years, she’s been content to huddle motionless on a heating duct like a small, furry homeless person.  But ever since I had her decayed teeth removed, she’s taken to darting out in front of me a la Hogan’s Alley.  (Can she still chew, you ask?  Judging from the filet she swiped and inhaled last week, the answer is yes.) 

Hey, guess what, Jordie?  I’m not Leona Helmsley and you’re not in the will.  Also, after paying the equivalent of college tuition for your surgery, my only asset is a handful of plus-sized Madras plaid pants.  This brings me to the next likely conspirator - Martha Stewart.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock - or in a gym – you’ve noticed the cupcake revolution.  Once the bastion of school birthday parties, cupcakes are now sold in boutiques, not bakeries.  (Coincidentally, a dozen costs exactly as much as the original Apollo mission.)

Happily, gourmet cupcakes can be replicated at home using Martha Stewart’s recipes.  The woman calls for using a pound and a half of butter in a vanilla-cream frosting that’s so addictive the cake becomes nothing more than a lipid-delivery-vehicle.  I consider every insidiously delicious bite another step on my path to an angioplasty.

The fourth horseman in my coming apocalypse is the guy up the street with what I call the JFK assassination-mobile.  Said Lincoln Continental came complete with its original 1961 muffler, which stopped muffling around the time LBJ slapped a pair of longhorns on its hood.  The extent of my neighbor’s mechanical prowess entails revving the engine for hours on end, which serves the dual purpose of (a) causing the blood vessels in my brain to rupture and (b) nothing.

Last night, I’d just fallen asleep when the pictures on my wall began to rattle.  For 911 purposes, I needed to verify it was my neighbor’s car and not some other jerk with a forty-eight year old muffler.  So I dashed to the stairs where my socks hit the friction-free zone and caused me to take flight.  I banked off the wall and bumped down twelve of the slickest risers ever.  Miraculously, I landed on my feet only to stumble over the cat and into the leg of the couch.  The subsequent snapping in my left foot prompted shouting so loud I feared I’d burst a buttery artery.

As I clutched my chest and my foot, I finally realized the highly coordinated plot against me and I vowed to buy aluminum foil first thing in the morning.  You see, I have a hat to make.