Try to recall the person you thought you were and the moment you began to realize you are not that person, and try to grasp and appreciate the high quality of lunacy required for you to have ever thought you were that person. Determine if it is reasonable to assume that there might be a conservation of sadness and happiness in the universe, as there is alleged to be a conservation of mass and energy. Ponder issuing a monograph called The Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics of Human Emotion, which will posit that the sloppitudes of human wants and fears and hopes and satisfactions and dissatisfactions and mournings and celebrations can be as precisely known as quantities of entropy and Gibbs free energy and the location of a particular subatomic particle, at a particular time, on the backside of the moon. Procure for yourself some good hard cooked cheese and eschew, as you do, raw soft cheese.
Prepare your backpack. Line up all the velcro closures in your environment. Pine Sol the entire joint. Skip down to the mailbox and disregard the mail when you get it home. Picture in the cumulus clouds above you on the mail run a dog it would not be bad to have with you on the ground. Ponder whether you really do have the balls to refuse medical treatments in the event you are diagnosed terminally or with something that might as well be. Call Mickey Milam and ask him if it is permissible for a person in this county to be put on a funeral pyre and burnt. Try to use up the can of sweetened condensed milk and resolve to never open another one. Try to figure out what thyme actually tastes like and how you could know oregano and cilantro but not tarragon and thyme. Don’t regret anything today except the standard recycling regrets, and do not resist regretting those, which deepens and protracts the act of the regretting. Name Cloud Dog, if he would but come down, Nu-Ra Buddy in the Sky With Diamonds, and explain to him that he is sired by the most famous beagle in history out of a song by the Beatles, and say, “Beagle, Beatle — how cool is that?” to him, and watch him thump his tail in earnest gratitude for the attention and hold you altogether blameless for being an idiot. Resist the conclusion that if he does not perceive you to be an idiot he is an idiot himself. Show him a measure of the charity he shows you. Which is to say, love him with equal reciprocating indiscrimination and be for once, or for a few moments, which is what once means, a man as happy as a dog.
The infamous pit-dog-breeding drug-running money-laundering felon Lumbee Indian who called you recently and left a phone number he stumbled with and then called back and gave a corrected one for, neither of which works, so you cannot call him back now — call the Fayetteville Detective Bureau and leave a message that a friend of yours up there has you worried and maybe they know something, and when the silliness of this settles in on you after the call, look in the narcotics drawer and see what there is. Go downstairs and get the football with the split bladder beside your daughter’s bed and take it outside and kick it into the woods. This will not be very far, since the thing holds no air, and after a day or so when the picture of mold on the dead football has a firm place in your mind go get the football and wipe it off well and put it back beside your daughter’s bed. Say, out loud if you want to, pretending perhaps that the narcotics have taken effect and so you have excuse to talk to yourself, She is a handsome girl who will not die of loneliness and not a spindly boy (as I was) who would have died of loneliness (as I did), my prayers on this score were answered, and she has not lied to spindly boys and broken their hearts, my prayers ditto, so all in all I am feeling very good about her and about her liking footballs and I cannot kick this thing into the woods even if it were the case, which it is not, that its green deterioration there would not break my heart and keep me from sleeping and make me have to move.
Take yourself in hand. Get a heft of yourself, then prudently release yourself from hand: it is too late. Do not be overtroubled by the chicken’s standing for you; you are her rooster and she must be herself. If you want to be troubled about something, be troubled that you let her rooster be killed by the airhead neighbors’ airhead dogs unavenged. Today is a good day to give no one a hard time about anything, or today is a good day to give everyone a hard time about everything. You must decide how you wish to presume. Look up “salamander”: you want the culinary meaning, which may well go back to medieval times. Do not oppress any of the women you have already oppressed, and try not to oppress any new ones. Try to get all the way to the grave, in fact, without oppressing another woman. You will need the equivalent of one of those harnesses that mechanically extracts the fainting lab worker from the immediacy of a noxious chemical reaction in research and manufacturing processes. Salute in your mind William “Mayo” Smith, who invented PVC using just such harnesses and who talks a good game of oppressing women but to your knowledge has not oppressed one yet, and yet he changed the world with his polyvinyl chloride. He in fact de-oppressed a lot of women, if we want to take a special-angle view of Mayo and his work, by reducing the time a woman might have to look at a plumber’s butt crack to the time it takes a plumber to glue a PVC fitting together, about ten seconds. That is the speed of light compared to his threading and installing a piece of black pipe, and you should be in a position at all times to let the world know, and its women, what Mayo Smith has done for them. Just before you oppress another woman, you might, in fact, just say, Excuse me, I know Mayo Smith, and in his honor, lest it be besmirched by my staying here any longer, I have to go.
Admit the woman and her daughter to your house so that they can go to the ecology conference without staying at the Zen hostel. Have it explained that this is the eco conference, this month, not the solar-panel workshop, next month, for which you initially agreed to let them stay in your house, because a friend of yours asked if this was feasible and you said it was, not paying attention to dates, so when the woman called you naturally assumed she was on about the solar-panel workshop, but she was not, and now you have accepted the mother-daughter eco team twice into your house. Have it explained that the program of intense stretching and lymph-liberating mojo that she purports to trade for the room will take at least two and a half hours and that Sally, the daughter, was born here, and the only reason she was born at all is because Sheila Harr, a famous crazy landlord in the area, sixteen years ago during the Danny Rolling reign of terror, when she, the woman, demanded iron bars on the ground-floor windows because someone’s boyfriend had merely crawled through a window to get to an upper room to get his shit back from the girl who’d kicked him out, and if an ordinary boyfriend just getting his shit could get in that easily what did it say about how easily Danny Rolling could cut all their heads off — on day fifteen Sheila Harr showed up with the iron bars, but she, the woman, was like, No I am already OUT of here, and went downtown to a large house with four men in it and took up with one of them, “And the rest is, well,” she says, smiling and indicating Sally with a motion of her arm not unlike Vanna White’s indicating a letter on the board, “history.” Regard ever so slyly Sally standing there, who says, “That’s great, Mom,” and heads for the bedroom you have lent them. As soon as the mother goes to the car to get the $1800 infrared pad they will sleep on because the room is freezing and they have the $1800 infrared pad, try to repair the girl, feebly, but try.