A sad, pathetic man eats his lunch alone. He doesn’t mind. He’s outside in the park, it’s a nice sunny day, people are enjoying themselves all around him. Today for lunch he has an egg salad sandwich, some baby carrots and an apple juice. For him it’s a healthy lunch. More often than not it will be leftover pizza or leftover pizza pockets or a stale bagel with some sweaty cheese. On Fridays he treats himself to a Big Mac meal, but he’s thinking about changing that.
Today marks the first day of his new, healthier lifestyle. Apple juice is good for you, carrots improve your eyesight and eggs have Omega 3. He doesn’t know what that means for him, but the carton of eggs had Omega 3 written on it in big letters so he knows it’s not a bad thing. His bread is whole grain.
“What other lifestyle changes is he thinking of making?” you might be asking.
Well, he’s started to go to bed at a regular hour, 10pm, and gets his full 8 hours by 6am. Waking up that early makes his day feel so long and now he doesn’t know what to do with his time. Too many hours in the day. It was better in some ways when he was only getting four hours a night, had to force himself to get up for work, grumbling and hating everything. At least his constant tiredness made him irritable and life seems like it has meaning when you have something to complain about. At that time his whole day was just a sort of fog, events and people that he only half-registered passed by him, what little bit of his surroundings he was able to focus on made him angry or tense, until the feeling passed and he sunk back into the haze. Went home, made dinner, or maybe got takeout and then went to bed. Maybe if he was feeling rebellious he didn’t brush his teeth. But no longer! Today is the first day of the rest of his life.
Sandwich finished, he opens his reusable container filled with apple juice and takes a sip. It tastes good and it punctuates exactly how he’s feeling today. Healthy and bland. He sets it down next to him, starts on the carrots and notices a horde of pigeons nearby. A toddler is feeding them some sort of mushy looking thing, maybe old macaroni. A cyclist goes by and the pigeons scatter into the air. As they fly over, one of them shits and the shit lands right in his apple juice. The man is disheartened, but at the same time, what are the chances of that? The hole in his reusable water bottle is only an inch wide, maybe an inch and a half. Crazy. So he can’t have his apple juice anymore, that’s okay. Now he has an interesting story to tell. He looks at his watch and realizes it’s time to go back to work. Grabs his bottle of juice and shit, throws out the wrapper from his sandwich and finishes his carrots on the walk back. When he gets back to work he goes to the bathroom and pours his tainted juice in the toilet, takes a pee and flushes. Then he punches in. Goes up to a co-worker and recounts the tale of his lunchtime.
“So I was sitting in the park and a pigeon shit in my apple juice!”
“That’s so gross,” the co-worker says back to him.
“I know! And the hole at the top of my water bottle is only like an inch, maybe an inch and a half wide! What are the chances!”
“That’s really gross.”
“I know!”
Now he’s satisfied. It’s so rare he ever has an interesting story to tell and that’s something that’s always kind of bothered him. He’d be at work and a colleague would come in with a crazy story from their weekend or the night before and tell it to someone else and our hero would listen in and be in awe. Some people lead such interesting lives! But now he too is one of those people. The benefits of his new, healthy lifestyle were already showing themselves.
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Widdershins Lit 