Wipe Your Feet

Lately I’ve been feeling too eccentric to post a lot.

I’m in this contented fog, because I have health insurance, and because it’s summer, and because I’ve decided to give myself a break from worrying for a month; this is great, actually, but it’s left me feeling like a retired bon vivant. When I don’t have much structure I turn into the kind of person who really lets themselves mellow, like a Parrothead in Key West getting weirder every day. It began with the leg-staining incident. After that, I decided that clothes and the brightness of your skin should not define a person. With this in mind, I am wearing dirty white flip flops. Out of the house, in it, cooking, whatever. I feel extremely free.

I have taken to wearing acid-wash jeans and not wearing makeup. I could be a felon on Dog: The Bounty Hunter. The thing is, I have health insurance. I earned it this year by losing a bet on TV about the freshness of my breath. Today I went outside without sunscreen to eat a package of dried seaweed and drink a pint of coffee. With Sweet n’ Low. That’s how I take my coffee. My skin sang a song, and the song was called WE’RE PARTYING. It was also 5 PM, but before I had real health insurance, I took major precautions. The reason it was 5 PM when I went outside is because I woke up this morning at 1:30 PM. It isn’t that I don’t have things to do, it’s that I now stay up in Abercrombie & Fitch pajamas from 1997 wearing facial peels and doing my work, like the Unabomber’s pacifist girlfriend. The other day I was like, “Man, isn’t it great to accept that you’re an artist?” At the time I was driving to the medical marijuana dispensary and listening to E-40. Later I would spend two hours thinking about what it would be like to be a hummingbird.

One thing that always stressed me out was worrying over when I’d ever be able to get a full-time job while also part-time acting and part-time writing. I didn’t realize how much this stressed me out: I haven’t been eligible for health insurance for four years, other than the out-of-pocket disaster insurance that costs a zillion dollars. I always worked part-time and never was quite willing to give up on auditioning and writing enough to scrap it for full-time with benefits. But I knew that the day was coming. The end was nigh. I remembered TGI Friday’s benefit package. I remember the Optical plan, which was sensational. Perhaps I weighed the deliciousness of the breadsticks during lunch break with the misery of Hawaiian shirts during themed weeks.

I am not generally sickly, but I realize now that the past four years have been spent in desperate communication with my body: how are you doing in there? Everyone all right? What’s this mole? What’s that twitch? How are you wisdom teeth, way back in there, are you seated for good? And your gums? What of the spleen — where are you, where do you reside? Somewhere below the lungs (oh shut up lungs, please, shut up!). I wake up and ask my body how it is. I go to sleep and promise myself I will take a yoga class, even though the thought of yoga class hits me with the SAT-feelings. Dread. And then I cough, and am filled with more dread. But not now!

If you’ll excuse me, I have to finish this glass of lukewarm coffee and change into my feather-accented robe.