tell me something, but you rub it on your rough patches and it just dissolves the scales? Listen, I’m not a scientist, but my feet feel softer and look more pink, so I think it’s working.
I got some bloodwork done and found out I’m deficient in Vitamin D, which I already knew because of ~extreme depression~ thank you so much. I don’t even have time to get into all the shit you need to be doing for your dumb blood. And your organs, which you shouldn’t even have to worry about since you can’t see them. At least I might catch a glimpse of my back in a multi-mirrored room, but tell me, pretty please, when I might ever get a look at my pancreas? Folic acid! Potassium! Calcium! Turmeric! Zinc! B12! Sodium! Magnesium! There are not enough hours in the day for all the motherfucking beans you need to be eating. The bananas, the kale, the eggs, the blueberries, the walnuts, the oats, the salmon, the broccoli, the oranges, the bell peppers, the plain yogurt, the cherries, the brussels sprouts, the flaxseeds, the celery sticks, the spinach, the tomatoes, the nineteen cups of unsweetened green tea. I need to know how to get some extra cow stomachs to hold all the shit that’s going to keep me alive plus all the shit I actually want to eat.
Who are these people who somehow get the correct serving of carrots every day? Where do these positive bodies find time for all that sauerkraut and avocado? I know I have the same number of hours in my day as Beyoncé, but do I really have the same number as a person who manages to consume both a beneficial number of almonds and perform an adequate amount of cardiovascular exercise? I don’t believe I do! All I could muster the energy for today was two sips of green juice (haha jk it was Diet Coke) and some accidental SPF.
Loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits. I’m calling in sick.
country crock
Before we got married, I thought that my soon-to-be wife and I could pioneer a new type of marriage situation that some “relationship expert” would eventually dissect in The New Yorker, the kind of marriage in which she could continue to hang laundry on a line and churn her own butter in rural Michigan, while I spent the days counting down to my early death in a small, refrigerated apartment in Chicago. She could keep withering under the blazing sun while picking her own blueberries to make homemade jam and knitting socks to sell at the Christmas bazaar, while I ordered seventeen-dollar cocktails at swanky rooftop bars and waited four hours for a brunch table downtown. We’d meet up occasionally to talk about married shit (property taxes? which big-box retailer has the best deal on economy-size containers of powdered soup?!) and pretend we’re still interested in having sex. Sounds like a dream, right? But, oh no, fam, apparently marriage involves a little thing called compromise, a concept I’d been previously unaware of while withering on the single-person vine. Compromise for my lady meant having to wake up next to a framed photo of Jheri curl–era Ice Cube on her bedroom wall, but for me meant GIVING UP EVERYTHING I EVER LOVED.
When I was thirty-seven years old, I packed a suitcase full of clothes that require dry cleaning and my unclean houseplants into a mid-size SUV with four-wheel drive, and drove through Indiana’s industrial ghost towns to the sticky-sweet Southwest Michigan fruit belt, immediately regretting my decision to move to the town my girlfriend lived in as I drove past billboard after faded billboard advertising AM Christian radio stations and upcoming casino performances by smooth jazz has-beens. I grew up in a Very Liberal Suburb just north of a Politically Progressive City. My family did not have any money for frivolous things that might make childhood worth surviving (LOL, what is a lunchbox?) and qualified for every government assistance program in existence. My parents had the foresight to apply for section 8 housing in a Chicago-adjacent mid-size city where there were music classes and art classes available to me, and, sure, I might have gone to school wearing some classmate’s dad’s old work shirt because it had been in a donation bin at the Salvation Army,