"Can you get hurt by eating a wooden spatula?" I asked Donny in our daily morning conversation which is designed to get the brain moving enough to be able to invent other distractions from beginning work after we get off the phone.
"Why'd you eat a wooden spatula?"
"I was making my fruit smoothie last night..." (I'm 11 days off sugar thank you and of course feeling amazing, neither burping up brownies the next morning nor feeling the abject shame of scarfing fifth and sixth helpings at 5AM in a sleepy stupor. The "smoothie" is my fake dessert and works very well. Frozen organic blueberries, strawberries, a banana and unsweetened soymilk.)
I continued telling Donny the situation. "I was mashing the fruit down into the Vita mix with a wooden spatula, like, 'I know this is stupid but I just won't hit the blades,' and the Vita mix is like the Ferrari of blenders, it's so powerful you can make soup in it cause it goes so fast it makes things hot. You can go from a frozen smoothie to hot fruit bread in three minutes if you're not careful. So the spatula catches on the blades and half of the spoon part is chopped off but it was the last of the fruit and I figured the Vita mix would make this shit a fine, tasteless sawdust so I just carried on, but I feel kind of sick now."
"No, that's fine. You should eat the wooden spatula. It's fiber."
"I was spitting out little fucking wood chips. It was gross."
"No, that's good for you."
"I get enough fiber in my psyllium husk every day, I don't need any fucking wood fiber. You don't see 'Wood Chip Fiber' in the store."
"In Europe they do."
"They do?"
"Sure." He was fucking with me as he usually does. It's the only way he can continue to deal with my daily neurotic paranoia. I went with it, hoping, even though I know it was bullshit, to get some relief.
"I mean we're made of wood so it can't of hurt me, right?"
"No, we're made of water."
"Water, wood, whatever. Elements. Wood is in the element family."
"No, it's not."
"Well, it's a cousin. It's part of earth... No it's not. I'm all fucked up. What am I a fucking goat? Eating wood. A dog? Maybe I should have some dirt for breakfast, that could be good." I was getting worked up.
"You'll be fine. Just go have a good shite." Donny's Irish from way back so he likes, as I do, to use that pronunciation instead of 'shit.'"
"Yeah. I'm gonna go shite. I'll obtain you later." I hung up and went to the bathroom. Usually, because of the psyllium husk, my shite is all nice and together and very regularly shited, three times a day, like clockwork. But my stomach just felt gross from the spatula. Do they treat it with fucking shellac or some shit? Even though it was clean it was discolored from many years of use. What evil bacteria lives deep inside the wood like the Keebler Elf's diabolical doppelganger?
I shited. It didn't feel like that one cleansed me.
I shited again... Nope.
FUCK! It's staying in there! Maybe I'm just sick to my stomach over the Mets game tonight and it has nothing to do with the spatula. I wiped, inspecting the tissue very carefully, much more carefully than my usual cursory glance. Fuck! No wood chips! I flushed, very concerned, and went to the health food store to get a new bottle of psyllium husk since I was out and definitely needed my daily dose to try and help flush this growing knot in my gut out of me before a fucking oak started growing in there. OH MY GOD? Can trees grow inside people like babies? No, come on. Don't be an idiot. Hey, this is a guy who gets HIV tests from kissing girls, no hypochondriacal fantasy is past me.
I washed down the thick fake wood chip drink, which is what the psyllium husk always reminded me of, to try and help push out the real wood chip drink I had last night.
I still feel sick though. Let me go try and shite again. If I die, and don't get to share with you anymore, I just want to say I've had a really great time in my life and thanks for reading and being supportive. It will be sad that neither shooting heroin, driving drunk for ten years, inhaling massive amounts of cocaine and then playing basketball, nor any of the other things I did that other people die from was my undoing, but it was the wooden spatula smoothie. I'm telling you, the way my life goes... it probably would be. Pray for me.
Posted by Eric Schaeffer at 11:54 PM