There is only one thing that I really crave whenever I’m sad or angry. It also seems to work when I’m hungry. Or belligerent, melancholic, or ambivalent. I’ve noticed that when I’m feeling nauseous, like after I’ve eaten too many peanuts after eating too much sausage stew (with blood!) after drinking too many Margaritas after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl, it still manages to satisfy my cravings. And you know when you’re sitting at your desk at school, and you push your chair up onto its back legs, and you start flailing your arms around and around because you might fall forwards but might also fall backwards? You know that feeling? It always seems to cure this feeling too, even if I haven’t been to school since before Vanilla Ice.
Once I was peeved because a driver cut me off on Route 95, and was honestly considering, between bouts of shouting unheard epithets, driving if necessary all the way to Florida to wreak my automotive revenge, but found shortly thereafter that a single dosage of it worked wonders.
When I awake at night, bathed in sweat, the echoes and shadows of a terrifying nightmare still webbed across my brain, there is only one elixir that returns me to a state of balance.
When I do crosswords, and have a tough time with 43 Across (or 24 Down): “All these steaks are too well done”?, I find that it works wonderfully to put things in the proper perspective.
And when people are starving in Bangladesh, or another species is being wiped out, or another disease, created and fostered by us, is running rampant, or Our Great And Exalted Leader is setting the bar at yet another all-time low, it does just fine telling me there’s no better way to start solving the world’s problems than it.
I have not found any negative feeling or situation that it can’t help or improve, and can say with great confidence that even if there were something out there that it didn’t help, then trying to use it anyway is still definitely worth it.
What I really crave is the Potion of Motion, which has gotten us thus far, and promises to take us much further, assuming there are no headaches. There are no wonders “in heaven and Earth”, there is nothing more impressive or miraculous “dreamt of in your philosophy” than constructing “the beast with two backs”.
But “I don’t want to beat around the bush…
Foxtrot, Uniform, Charlie, Kilo…”
-with apologies to Steven Wright, Dave Barry, Vanilla Ice, Shakespeare, the Bloodhound Gang, my Mom,
and anyone else whose toes I’ve stepped on here.