Opening Crawl

I can’t find my jelly!

This is what my girlfriend woke to the other morning: me sitting cross-legged on the floor and screaming into an open refrigerator, clad in houndstooth-print jammies, tossing the contents of the fridge onto the kitchen floor behind me, taking fat free milk hits to the dome, straight from the jug, then cursing cows. Cursing farmers. Both of my hands were shaking; I was holding back tears. It was 8 a.m. I will be 35 years old in July.

where my preserves at?

It’s right here, she said.

And it was. A full jar of strawberry preserves right there on the counter behind me. At some point, between 7 and 8, during my morning walk-about through the apartment, I’d pulled the jar from the fridge, sat it on the counter, and immediately returned to the fridge to search for it.

My meltdown wasn’t just a result of the potentially catastrophic scenario whereby I would have to eat something other than a pb&j (a morning craving that never happened before and hasn’t happened since), but over my instinct’s insistence that I open my laptop first thing every morning and look at the Internet.

Facebook self-portraits: here’s me being sexy, here’s me vulnerable, here’s how Instagram says I would have been depressed in 1972, look at the puppy, look at the kitty, here’s a sad video, here’s something incredibly personal that the world ABSOLUTELY MUST KNOW! ESPN tries to convince me, again, that golf is a sport, that when LeBron James smiles he breathes oxygen, as Jordan did, and so he must be the greatest. Here’s an obnoxiously self-righteous article in stock liberal rhetoric, and here’s the tunnel vision anti-freedom of a stock conservative. Did I read the link to a poorly written essay on poorly written poetry? Sure did. Did I click the link to the poem written about, well, nothing in particular? Of course. Who doesn’t need a little word vomit with coffee?

And this all boils over in my kitchen, over jelly. And two hours later I’m fine. I love sad videos, pictures of photoshopped flowers, personal anecdotes. Hell, I’m so happy I could shit koalas. I love essays and poetry and all the words and all the things and, yes, even the NBA.

This is a common morning scenario. Awake, stumble, computer, rage. I usually complain, at length, to the girlfriend, email or text complaints to friends and family. They’ve done their best to play along, have shaken their heads at the irrational Mink. But I really should leave them be. Someone suggested a blog. We’ll see what happens.