our wonderful household is wonderful in our wonderful house: two cats, a rabbit still living and thriving indoors only. A legion of expired pets are buried or somehow inaccessibly disposed within property lines of our sweet residence. And so, as my blessed wife left for a week’s fun in Florida, her final pleas to me before closing the back door upon leaving were these: take out the garbage because it stinks; please make sure the cats have an extra bowl of water and a heaping bowl of food; please change the paper in the rabbit cage and see that Cici (the rabbit) has plenty of water and food too.
But an hour before she left, my beloved apologized to me and begged that I cut the chicken, I didn’t necessary have to de-bone the thing, but I at least remove the remaining breast meat into separate bags and place them in the freezer. Would I please do it now because I’ll forget about it if I don’t.
I didn’t. And I did.
Not five minutes after herself drove around the corner on her way to the airport, my phone buzzes. Just wanted to remind you about the cat food and their water, honey, she said. Oh, and Cici. So I remind her I’m not leaving for a couple days yet. My trip to San Antonio was on the sad occasion of my aunt passing. A couple of more appointments I couldn’t get moved blocked my leaving town. Yes, she said, but please do the chicken. Already done, I lied. She knew I was lying. The joke was ours, again, that old couple’s joke recurring as predictable as weather. Okay, she said, but be sure you do it within the next day or it’ll go bad.
I knew this. She knew I knew this and that her reminding me probably lessened the likelihood of me completing the task. Alright, then. I promised. Love you. Love you too.
Cut the chicken and put in the freezer before it goes bad.
Brain juice is the stuff your body makes so you can think, feel, reason and do all the things you as a human can do that animals cannot do. Sometimes availability of brain juice exceeds demand and during these times of plenty a brain explore creative ways of disposing of the juice. Increased creativity is often a result of plentiful brain juice. And so, ideas come in quick but manageable waves like the egress of workers through the main lobby of an office high rise whose human traffic peaks at the load capacity of all functioning elevators. The lobby remains busy but not overcrowded.
Not every idea is a good one. This fact becomes more trivial as the heat rises in a brain juice economy. Self-editing is suddenly unnecessary as the obvious brilliance of every idea glares so sharply that one wonders why one never saw it before and how stupid everyone must be for having to have it explained to them. Sheesh.
Cutting up the chicken and putting it in the freezer never enjoyed the brilliant idea designation, priority though it was. Procrastinating doing so, however, was one of those glaringly obvious best ideas. Any right-minded human would concur. The problem arose from the task’s status as a chief priority, the chief priority, to be performed before and ahead of all others. And so, all other activity stopped. Nothing got done. No things on any list were accomplished. The rubber band of necessity tightened as hours piled up into days.
I knew I needed to clean house, at least tidy up the place before I split. After that I could pack my clothes. But before packing was laundry so I could have clean clothes to pack.
The Saturday dental appointment got moved to a day earlier. That Friday I would use for recovery. I would take it easy until Saturday morning and do all my chores then, during the time I had originally scheduled for dental work. Of course, this plan was brilliant. Things were working out better than expected. If I began really feeling well, I could actually leave early in the morning and be pleasantly ahead of schedule. How nice.
That damn chicken needed doing. My wife, well under the influence all things Disney, had by now moved on from her life’s purpose of reminding me to do something meaningful with the leftover poultry. Her communications leaned heavily toward phone texts, goofy photos of her and Goofy and a bunch of other enchanted characters, attached. Had she forgotten the chicken? I hadn’t, and I was cursing myself for my irresponsible lack of attention to such a simple matter. I would get to first thing in the morning. But the moment right then and there was surely compromised, no doubt at all, from laboring in the dentist’s chair, gassed to near hallucinatory comfort, mouth overly extended in an opened position, numbed beyond mentioning, all efforts focused on complying with the dentist’s instructions with particular emphasis on every conceivable nuance of his assistant’s behavior and how I might parlay my absolute passive condition into our conceiving a child together. The resulting exhaustion easily extended into the next morning, perfectly excusable as matter-of-fact behavior according to any and all humans with moderate life experience. The chicken would be fine. No problem. The important thing was that I rest up, get my head clear and be fully awake and alert for the three-hundred mile drive southwest later that day.