Who Woke Up Sucking a Lemon?

When ironing I do most of my day’s work. I imagine I hit people with all my force—my shirts double for the people I really dislike. You text me that I have to hit the people in the groin. I text: I’m afraid they may become compulsive buyers, steal from neighbors or rummage in their garbage, maybe even shoplift at stores.

(You see, I was a rough child wearing a panda hat or a mohawk on alternate days. The painting that I stared at so much, on our bathroom wall, in my wet nudity stared back at me—purple and humid—with vampiric eyes. I was marked in myriad ways.)

My sloth is crippling. I consider a word and an image of equal weight—like weak tea and a pipe of tobacco. What I really need are heirloom glass ornaments made into piles of colored glass shards spread deep about the living room shag—and multiple band aids. I iron and stop after 14 minutes, as per CDC recommendation. And anyway, it was a lime.

“I am, on and off, an Anthropophobe. I’m afraid of people, as I am of rats and mosquitoes, afraid of the nuisance and the harm of which they are untiring agents.”

— Guido Morselli / Dissipatio H.G.