If you are what you eat, today I was a coconut cookie head.



Not pictured: Girl Scout cookies #2 and #3. And #4. And banana bread.

Many sleepless moons ago, it was easy to find a comfy mid-night refuge in Mom and Dad’s mammoth water bed. I’d quietly sneak through the door, lie down in between them, latch onto the comforter, and sink into a nice, dreamy sleep.

But not before kicking my snoring father in his shins repeatedly, at my mother’s request. 

I feel pretty bad about this, but that old family tradition has tracked Cory and me down, 18 years later. 

Thump. Kick. Thwack. I still got it!

I saw something a few weeks back—something sinister, something grody. And I wasn’t the only one.

One hot June afternoon, two cars were approaching an uncontrolled intersection within my apartment complex. One was driven by me; the other by a 30-something soccer-mom type. We were doing, oh, about 15 miles per hour, no more. The air was perfect; our windows were down. But instead of yielding to one another when the time came, we both dropped our jaws and came to an eventual stop. We made eye contact and I knew that we were mutually disturbed by what was unfolding. A man was walking—no, staggering—in front of us. He was clutching his stomach, clearly incapacitated, and headed haphazardly toward the grassy knoll before us. Suddenly with no warning our eyes and ears beheld the horror: an unstoppable surge of vomit, projectile and all, soaking the grass, the pavement, and my long-term memory compartment. Like a solar eclipse or rotting roadkill, we tried to not look but we couldn’t. And then when it hit us (reality—not the man’s vom), we burned rubber and fled to the safety of our homes.

For the rest of that evening my brain sat idle, capable only of summoning the image of a nomadic puking man, the sounds of chunky fluid splattering everything in sight, and the unresolved matter of wtf just happened?!