The start of a short-story?

It was noon, and Harold was four hours late for work. Wading through the murky bogs of the Florida Everglades he mused about where things had gone wrong. Had it been his failure to change the bedding of his pregnant rabbit, Floyd? The ammonia fumes from the accumulated urine had killed her and her unborn bunnies, her stiff leporine corpse discovered the next day by his three-year-old nephew Hyundai. The little boy had gone into fits, screaming and spitting, and in his terror at the first grim confrontation with mortality had knocked over the television that had been playing the Lakers/Suns game, and an angry room of Laker fans in Kobe Bryant jerseys set upon the boy, giving him a darn good spanking.

You don't even have to cook it!

Since June I've been stealing my wireless internet from the girl down the hall. Recently she changed up and protected her wireless internet with a password, leaving me feeling cut off from the world.
Today I write from my father's dining room. Earlier I made a steak sandwich and watched Giada de Laurentis on Food Network, a woman who describes nearly everything she cooks as tender and grins at her cutting board like a jack-o-lantern while she works. Today she took five minutes of her show to show us a vibrant appetizer of beautiful sun-dried tomatos (she likes sun-dried tomatos because of their beautiful color, because they're tender, and because they burst with a vibrant sort of flavor) tender fresh basil leaves and some beautifully white and sweaty fresh mozzerella (pronounced MUTT-zer-EL-la), all of it put on skewers. "You don't even have to cook it!" she cried.
Giada made these tender and vibrant kabobs for a small gathering she was hosting. Some "friends" were coming over to watch "the big game." At the end of the show her friends came into the kitchen, laughing and slapping each other on the back.
"Okay everybody," cried Giada, "Take two kabobs!"
And her friends took two kabobs.
"Now take a sandwich! Everybody take a sandwich!"
And they took sandwichs. Carl took two, that scamp.
"Now go to the living room! Everybody, living room! Go! Now!"
And they did. It was surreal watching a person act this way on camera with no apparent shame. One can only assume that she saw nothing wrong with ordering her friends around the kitchen, barking to them what they are allowed to eat. It was bizarre, but refreshingly sincere. I felt I had caught glimpse of Ms. de Laurentis's everyday life.
"Maybe after the big game I'll have some help cleaning up!" she winked to the camera. I have a feeling Carl paid through the nose for his extra sandwich.

Pink Eye III

The doors opened, sparing me my ambivalence, and another overly-friendly person, this a nurse in her mid-twenties, cheerfully called us all "hon" and "sweetie" as we came in to the waiting room. Moments later I was giving insurance information to a woman something like a cross between Kelly Rippa and Ruth's hippie sister on Six Feet Under. When she asked me what was wrong with me she did it in a pre-school teacher sort of voice, as though I were a toddler who fell while learning to walk, and she stuck out her lower lip in a pouty sort of a cartoon frown. I told Her I had pink eye.
"Yef, I cun see yo eye iss pwetty eewa-tated,"
I felt mocked.
Back with overly-friendly nurse 1 (Patient First's customer service maybe cloyingly sweet and insincere but they do get points for speed), I stepped onto a scale and shocked her with my weight.

Pink Eye II

If you want to avoid a wait at Patient First you've got to get there early. Not 4 am early, but well before 8 when they actually open. I showed up at five 'til, and was fifth in line at the front door with four strangers in front of me pretending that they and I did not exist. A thirty-ish woman in front of me noticed me smiling at the awkwardness of it and frowned, perceiving my smile to be I-know-not-what.
The silence was broken by stranger number six whose eye was, like my own, swollen and red, only more so. He was feeling down but friendly nevertheless.
"I got cast-iron in my eye," he told me.
"Jesus man, is it still in there?" I asked, instantly won over by the Youellian air of casual intimacy.
"Something's in there. Can you see it?" and he turned so I could get a good look.
He then told me about his long history of eye ailments, beginning when he was in elementary school and was stuck in the eye with a wire hanger (a la Michael Myers), and culminating in a horrific soldering accident two years back. He was laying on his back, soldering, and a piece of solder (that is to say, molten metal alloy used to join other solid metals) fell into his eye. I wondered that he could still see at all.
"Eye's the most resilient organ in the human body," he told me. "My wife had vlasic and she was able to see fine in less than two weeks."
"Holy shit," I said, half wishing to become friends, half worried that this was going to end like Enduring Love.
"Yeah, I guess at some point you'd think I'd learn. Ha."
"Yeah, you'd think." He grimaced when I said that, and I wished I said something more tactful, like, "Oh no, I too frequently injure myself in stupid ways! Oh goodness me!"
I let him in front of me, and we didn't really talk after that. I hope he's ok.

Pink Eye

I woke up early this morning with strep throat and conjunctivitis. The strep throat I knew about, I've been putting off going to the doctor all week, but the conjunctivitis was a surprise.
"Might as well go get it taken care of now," was my thought, so I put on some shoes and a hoodie and, not being familiar with their business hours, headed over to Patient First where I figured the wait would be brief and I could get my two prescriptions and move on to the 24 hour Walgreens across the street. It turns out Patient First isn't open at 4 am. I thought it was a 24 hour sort of operation, like an emergency room but cheaper. Apparently I was very wrong.
Up now and unable to fall back asleep I decided to do what I normally do at such times and put on a bad movie (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) and check the internet for things that might have gotten by me recently. I corresponded with two people I've been out of touch with, read an extended conversation on Slate about the playoffs this weekend, discovered that George Bush was sending more troops to Iraq (embarrassing to be so far behind), and left a comment on someone's myspace that quoted a Times review of a new Justin Timberlake movie. Apparently Alpha Dog provides "the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo." Chew on that, Hollywood!

Resolutions

The new year finds me depressed and sick, playing Guitar Hero alone in my room. My recent loss in my fantasy football league's championship game has hit me hard, and I'm planning on becoming an alcoholic on the order of Faulkner or Fitzgerald only not a good writer.
In the brief moments of 2007 when I shall be sober I plan to run a 10 k and write a novel about a young orphan girl's struggle to raise a blind puppy in the Australian outback. I'm thinking she's going to fail, her puppy will be bitten by one of Australia's many poisonous snakes, and she will turn to a life of intravenous drug use. I'm hoping I could win a Newbery medal.
Happy 2007!