WATERCOLOR

Last night my father challenged my sister and I to a push-up contest. When I bent over to do a push-up, some chocolate candy fell out of my pocket. I’d forgotten I’d put it there. My family was suspicious of me so I told them, “NO NO NO, YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG IDEA! IT’S NOT MINE! I’M JUST HOLDING IT FOR A FRIEND!”

Here are some of the phrases that appear written on the inside of DOVE CHOCOLATES wrappers:

“Dream your troubles away.”

“A little chocolate sin never hurt nobody.”

“Wash away the memory of your broken dreams with our chocolate.”

“Let your temptations run wild.”

“Cut your family into tiny peices, place them into a series of garbage bags, and bury them beneath your house. It will just be our little secret. Our little chocolate sinful secret. Now it can just be you and me, your secret eating friend. There’ll be nobody to find out about our secret calories. Calories of love.”

Later Lauren and I finally got caught up on the show “LOST”, which I recently began watching. When the character “CLAIRE” appeared as a ghost, my sister said, “WATER COLOR” in an Australian accent. She said this irrelevant phrase because it is one of a very small list of phrases she can competently use with an Australian accent.

I am currently reading Douglas Coupland’s “HEY NOSTRADAMUS”. It feels somewhat relevant to me right now, despite the fact that I have never been killed by machine guns inside a high school. (NOTE: Now that I have said, “I HAVE NEVER BEEN KILLED BY MACHINE GUNS IN A HIGH SCHOOL”, I will take extra care to never enter a High School again for the sake of never allowing my INTERNET DIARY to become a place of GRAVE PREDICTIONS THAT CAME TRUE BUT CAN NEVER BE DELETED FROM CYBER-SPACE.

It’s my father’s birthday on Monday. WHAT SHOULD I GET HIM? WHAT TO GET FOR THE MAN WHO HAS EVERYTHING. He’s going to be out of town. I’M THROWING A KEGGER AT THEIR HOUSE WHILE THEY’RE AWAY. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE.

Except there will be no keg. I’ll probably just drink root beer in their darkened backyard, watching the bats fly around overhead. I’ll tell myself a ghost story that starts like this: “Submitted for the approval of the midnight society…” and ends like this: “…and they say if you listen real close late at night…you can still hear the sound of Nazareth, Pennsylvania being slowly eaten by strip malls and housing developments. You can hear Norman Rockwell and D.W. Griffith rolling over and over in the grave they share together in the ‘Holy Family Cemetary’. You can still hear the ghost cars racing around the abandoned Nascar racetrack downtown.” Then I will pop out of a bush dressed like a car yelling, “OOGIDY BOOGIDY BOO!”