Grub Street Diet of the Damned
First thing, I scream myself awake and clip my eyelids open. I tend to be an early riser, and this helps me get my day going. Then I do my stretches (two-to-three dozen reps of the Sit And Reach flexibility test from the Presidential Fitness Challenge while a misty gray specter of my 7th grade gym teacher looks on in disappointment) and then, to jumpstart my metabolism, I drink a tall glass of water from a child’s murky wading pool. For breakfast, I enjoy some hard-cooked scrambled eggs—heavy on the brown patches, please—prepared by a childhood friend’s stressed out mom who resents my whole existence. After breakfast, I snack on some Speculoos cookies and trail mix that’s mostly raisins and drink a warm Mountain Dew from a souvenir mug with a painful sexual memory attached to it. I actually collect those!
For dinner, I meet up with some old friends who are more attractive than me and are doing insurmountably better in their careers. I’m a wee bit late due to traffic since the Presidents (Trump and Biden have agreed to share) are passing through town in their mass shooting survivor-manned palanquin motorcade—but luckily my friends have already snagged a table and discussed among themselves exactly what I’ve been doing wrong in my life and how quickly and easily they’d be able to remedy it if they were me, followed by a brief gratitude reflection on how lucky they are to not, in fact, be me. When I arrive, they’ve saved me a seat in the middle of a vinyl booth, which is perfect, since I’m wearing a skirt. This allows me the opportunity to slide-crouch-hover my way to my seat, my quad muscles burning as I profusely apologize for being late and profusely thank them for still agreeing to get dinner despite the awkward and obvious fact that I am lower than a worm to them. For a few minutes we look silently at the menu, my friends pondering whether or not they’ll be able to write this act of charity off in their taxes next year, myself pretending to read from the appetizer section that I’d already memorized from the restaurant website within five minutes of us making the dinner plans.
The waiter comes by to inform us that the entirety of the menu has been replaced by a small selection of “stone-fired flatbreads” that are all $27 each, in addition to the for-purchase snack selection from a domestic United flight and one single, perfect, delicious-sounding appetizer. The restaurant is playing the EDM playlist they borrowed from my junior year college roommate pretty loudly, so we have to yell our orders. One of my dining companions shouts over a bass drop that “We’re just going to be sharing a bunch of stuff,” smartly securing us a splitting fee. When our order of the one perfect appetizer arrives, it’s indeed delicious and the portion size is perfect: exactly one piece for each of us, plus one extra to sit there excruciatingly untouched on the plate as we all pretend to be satisfied by our portion, resolved to not be the one to take the last one. Finally, my friend Zoë, who corrects you if you don’t pronounce the umlaut, heroically agrees to take the last portion even though she already said she “wasn’t even that super hungry” because her high-paying job had a huge catered happy hour earlier in the day in honor of Beyoncé stopping by the office to congratulate them for just being themselves. Between courses, I rip my thighs from the vinyl booth, leaving a healthy chunk of outer epidermis behind, and excuse myself to use the bathroom—it’s conveniently located right next to the staff kitchen entrance, allowing me a cool opportunity to lock eyes with servers and busboys who correctly hate me for being part of the consuming class. After slipping through a snag in the time-space continuum and spending an infinite number of minutes waiting outside the restaurant’s one single-serve bathroom, pissing my pants repeatedly in an unbroken personal water cycle, I finally break through to the current timeline, where a very drunk and visibly unwell woman finally exits the restroom. I am worried and want to ask if she’s okay, but don’t, because I’m a coward. Also, I don’t want to be condescending. Also, she likely already hates me. The bathroom is well-stocked with a warm, dewey toilet seat and great acoustics that are put on display when, the moment I sit down, someone angrily pounds on the door as if I’ve been in there taking a four-hour shit. I wail back “Sorry, one minute!,” immediately submitting to the stranger’s show of dominance. I pee and it smells weird—probably cancer. I wash my hands in the sink that’s the type they have in public parks, where you have to press down on the top to make the water come out so you can only wet one hand at a time. They’re out of soap and paper towels and the mirror has the little girl from The Ring inside it.
When I rejoin my friends, they’ve helpfully decided that it’ll just be easiest to throw all our credit cards in and split the bill evenly. After their round of double espresso martinis arrives, we toast to Zoë’s recent engagement. She gives a brief speech where she reveals her plan for a Bachelorette weekend in Dubai followed by an intimate destination wedding on the moon, and she’s already picked out bridesmaids dresses for us all from Anthropologie. The server arrives and asks if we’d like dessert, which we decline. The new bride-to-be has requested that we celebrate by going to her favorite dessert spot down the block: apparently IT’SUGAR, the novelty candy store they have at Universal CityWalk, has opened a new location right here in the third circle of hell, so it works out perfectly. I can’t decide what to get, but an $18 package of cotton candy Peeps break free and attach themselves to my forearms like bloodletting leeches. Sold!
When I get home, I cry. Then, my boyfriend arrives home after a long day away and we catch up: apparently on the way home from his job as a right wing Supreme Court justice, he realized he’s in love with my middle school bully. I tell him about my day, too. We finish out the night by watching a supercut of all the times a monkey gets abused or killed in the Planet of The Apes franchise and sharing a bowl of stale tortilla chips, which we shove directly into deep, inflamed crevices in our gums. Finally, we head to bed. I can’t sleep, so I put on a little white noise: a recording of every time I’ve ever confidently misused drag queen slang. Get off, queen! After a few hours, I still can’t sleep, so I go to the bathroom and kill myself while the Ring girl watches from the mirror. That does the trick and before I know it, I wake up back in my bed refreshed and ready to do it all over again.
NEXT MONTH…IS JUNE! <3