March 30, 2020

I have a hunger that cannot be satiated, at least not by cucumbers. It is give or take the umpteenth day of quarantine. I have another bedroom-to-bedroom mental health Skye session tomorrow, and I hope my therapist can help me work through a thought I yelled out loud to myself.

“Thank God Dad is dead,” I whispered, cooing and cackling to myself.

Today, I tried to surprise Cecilia by running up the stairs and jumping into a stance, but instead I fled up the stairs, shot my hands into the ceiling, and fell to the floor because of the seismic pain in my thumb. I felt better when she later admitted that she did not know how big a trillion is, and that when she envisions sums of money greater than 200 dollars, all she can see is a vague green cloud of wealth. I felt bad about teasing Cecilia for her hatred of multiplication, and she was feeling stressed out about thesis deadlines, so I administered a strength roll.

A strength roll is part energy work and party hypnosis, and is always effective in treating depression and spiritual haunting. She lay face down in front of the television, and I rocked my girlfriend back and forth along her vertical axis, like a sexy rolling pin smoothing out the carpet dough. I made up the procedure as I went and it showed, but I think the soothing ranting saved the day.

“When you get up you’ll have so much… strong, so strong, and you… you’ll be a bird in a sky full of losers, lizards, ugly idiot lizards… also you will be focused and full, full of strength, again, and no lizards at all, you awesome fucking bird….”

Thesis is rough, and I’m glad I could help. While I was writing my own thesis, my therapist was firm on referring to the thesis experience as “ego-death,” which was fair albeit less than comforting terminology. I wish Rivver had called on something less scary and pointy as a descriptor, like a cucumber.

“Harry,” Rivver would have said, in a deep Southern drawl he would adopt to please me. “Thesis is one helluva cucumber.”