Dropping Neatly Into My Boxers

Another Morning

It's like 6. I wake up from this dream where I'm with my coworkers and we're staring out the window and watching around ten nuclear missiles drop to the Earth.
At first I just see this object spinning around the moon, making its way down towards the Earth. Then, I look and there's all these penile-looking objects with red Christmas lights around them, falling to the ground.
I'm watching this and not believing it, thinking its got to be something else. I don't mention to my coworkers what they might be. I figure they haven't got a clue that they're about to be incinerated and I don't want to be the one to bring it to their attention. But, at the same time I'm thinking I should hug someone or something.
One of them explodes in the mountain outside our office and then I wake up.
I take a whiz, return to bed and wake up again at 7.45 to the bleating of my cell phone. I always think it's a phone call for about 30 seconds, and then realize it's just the alarm.
I return to the bathroom, turn on the radio, take a pill, and rinse with Plax.
I just realized yesterday that you're supposed to rinse before you brush. The news came sharp and hard and I felt I had been failing my teeth for years.
I just read an article where poor dental hygiene can lead to death because the bacteria from your teeth can migrate down into the lungs and choke you to death on tiny green microbes that grow and grow and grow until your lungs explode like nuclear bombs.
After rinsing, I brush and then shower.
After dressing, I walk down my hallway passed a woman and her dog.
I could swear the dog barks "You're bleeding" and I look up at the woman and say "What?"
She just stares at me and fixes the hood around her jacket.
I walk into the stairway and check my body for blood, but find none.
Outside there's a homeless man in the parking lot of the 7-11 next door to my apartments. He's moaning as loud as I think he can. There's Chinese food all over the place and I begin grinding my teeth.
His pitch takes off and he's bleating incoherently. "EEEEEEEHHHHHHHHH!"
I move past him and he turns to me and whispers "You're dying, pal."
I walk into the 7-11.
I always load the bottom of my coffee cup up with ice, because the coffee is usually too hot to drink as is.
I put four sugars and a half and half in and grab an apple juice out of the cooler. When I let the door swing back, it swings through the racks of juices and disappears. I peer in and the door is gone. The juice is gone and I'm staring into a landscape full of volcanoes and there's this larger volcano erupting in the distance, but all that comes out is confetti and I'm thinking about New Year's last year when I saw a man being beaten by children on the side of the street and how he bled out of the side of his mouth and moaned for help and no one was helping him and then the
CLERK: Can I help you sir?
ME: I'm sorry, I was just...I thought the door was broken.
CLERK: The door isn't broken.
ME: But, I just thought that it was.
CLERK: The door is fine. The juice is fine.
ME: I know, I just thought that the door was broken.
CLERK: Your coffee is spilling.
ME: I'm sorry, I just want to – I'll just take this up front and I'll take off.
CLERK: Is that your friend outside yelling?
ME: Who?
CLERK: The man in the parking lot.
ME: Who?
CLERK: Can't you hear him?
ME: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no I don't know him. I think he's nuts.
CLERK: First a man spills Coke on my floor after I mop and now I got him out there. Well, I'm going to do something about him.
ME: Like, what are you going to do? I mean, to the man?
CLERK: Fucking throw him in a fucking volcano.
ME: What?
CLERK: That volcano, back in the cooler, I'm going to throw him in there. I can do it. I can scale that volcano, just to throw him in. I'm going to throw him in the volcano. There's nothing you can do about it. He's gonna burn.
ME: What? But it's full of confetti.
CLERK: Call the cops. I'm gonna call the cops.
ME: The cops.
CLERK: Yeah, on the guy out there. What're you on drugs?
ME: Drugs?
CLERK: Yeah, pills. You on pills?
ME: Pills?
CLERK: You gonna buy the coffee and the juice?
ME: What pills?
CLERK: Get out.
ME: No, wait, yeah, I'll buy the coffee and the juice.
CLERK: K.
ME: K.
And I do.
I'm outside, walking passed the homeless man and he's still screaming. The clerk follows me out and screams "You go now! Get out of the parking lot, I called the cops!"
I think he's screaming at the homeless guy, but he could be screaming at me.
I'm outside and I can't figure out if any of this is happening while I write it or before I wrote it.
I look up at the coffee shop across the street, at the Space Needle to my left, and then down at my keyboard in Issaquah, 15 miles away.
I keep writing as I walk and I'm walking by the dentist's office below my apartment and there's these pixilated people in the dentist's chairs. There's two chairs and one is just waiting on the dentist, while the other is being worked on by the dentist.
The dentist is crouched over the one, and he stutters between being pixilated and being Kodak quality real. He's older, has a comb over and is holding a pick axe.
He brings the pix axe over the patient's head and brings it down, sending bits of information about the pixilated man all over the office.
It gets on the other patient, who absently wipes it off himself and the dentists walks past a partition and crouches down to comfort the other patient. He's holding a rosary and saying a prayer with the man. He adjusts his combover, becomes pixilated and I keep walking.
In Issaquah, the sun is too bright through the window and my coworker pulls the shade.
I'm walking again, up the street to my car in Seattle.
I walk passed a woman who is mouthing the words "Why am I here?" as flies swarm from her mouth. She follows me to my car and I tell her that I'm going to work and that flies are coming out of her mouth and she doesn't respond.
I get in my car, release the emergency break, start the car and drive away.
I'm back in Issaquah and I'm writing. As soon as I pulled out, away from the woman, Seattle is in the past and I'm here remembering how I drove past Roy street and people were fleeing a Tower records and clawing at their faces. And I remember my face got all tingly and I pulled over on Mercer and turned on my radio and how Howard Stern was talking about Anna Nicole Smith as I watched in my rearview mirror as dozens of people were falling to their knees scratching blood out of their faces in some sort of horrific last grab at a cure for whatever was eating their faces away.
I look up and a coworker tells me that he's done with some program and that I can get into it. I don't respond. I keep typing. I'm typing now as he waits for a reply.
I stopped and told him that I was fine and that I would purchase the coffee and the apple juice once I figured out what was wrong with the volcano.
He's leaving now.
I'm back in Seattle, driving and watching these nuclear bombs drop down to