Do Not Kill Your Baby

During my twenty months working with small children at the Montessori school, I complained extensively and comprehensively. It was the perfect form of birth control. Once a month, I sent emails to myself. “Never ever have children,” they read. “Whatever you do, no kids for you.”

I finally escaped in August so that I could deal with all my shit at Vipassana, and then fly away to Mysore, India. There I would bond with my favourite cult and hopefully discover my life’s higher purpose. By the time I got to India, I missed kids. On the airplane, I felt envious of the mothers and fathers comforting their babies. In chanting, when all the kids are running around screaming, I wish I had a baby to hold, something else to do besides chant about sun gods, peace and elephants.

“Awe, look at this one,” I say to my Cool Friend From Belgium as we pass another toddler on the streets of Gokulam.

“Oh God, Erica,” says my Cool Friend From Belgium (CFFB). “Soon your boobs are going to start leaking milk.”

I’m happy my Cool Friend From Belgium mentioned this, because now I have the opportunity to tell everyone about me and the Boatman’s potential business project called Recreational Lactation (RL). Recreational Lactation means sucking on someone’s boobs for so long that they start making milk. Somewhere the Boatman heard that maybe this is possible. Since breast milk is apparently this magical and nourishing liquid, we thought that we could use my recreationally generated breast milk to make powerful and nutritious smoothies, ice cream and yogurt.  During my early days in Halifax, I had all the time in the world to make this plan materialize. Unfortunately, the Boatman had a pretty time consuming job and so he couldn’t fulfill his sucking responsibilities. My tits remained tiny and dry. Likely they will remain this way for some time as I endure this extended self-imposed dry spell. Regardless, I figured that somewhere in India, there were kids I could hang out with.

A couple weeks ago while wandering around my neighbourhood, I came upon a stone wall with this sign on it.

“Do not kill your baby,” it read. “Leave it here.”

Do Not Kill Your Baby

 

On one side of the sign was a picture of Krishna. The other side had a picture of Jesus. I walked in, passing a couple of young girls hanging laundry. At the front door, a woman was combing through the hair of a young girl with Down Syndrome. It looked like she was checking her scalp for lice. Inside, a very tiny child with what was probably cerebral palsy lay on a mat on the floor. Her eyes squinting and face disturbed, she bent her legs and straightened them repeatedly while clutching her fists in front of her chest. Two children, maybe ten or eleven were strapped into wooden high chairs. Their faces reminded of Isabelle, the woman I lived and worked with at L’Arche, and Glendon, the young boy my parents and I looked after when I was a teenager. So often kids with cerebral palsy have similar expressions and mannerisms, the same great big joy in their faces. I wondered how much money it would take to put wheels on these kids’ chairs. Or to get them a proper wheelchair.

After a few minutes, mobs of tiny children started wandering through the lobby and into a dark play room. None of them seemed to be wearing diapers, though they looked like they between one and three years old. A sturdier little boy in a red shirt stopped to say hello to me. He gave me a big grin and then started to smack me, laughing at each wack. I had a kid hit me repeatedly at the Montessori School.  At the time, it felt humiliating and insulting to be rejected by a three year old. In this case, however, I felt like I was getting special treatment. Even so, I waved my hands in front of me and shook my head.

“Ah,” I said, since I couldn’t speak one word of Kannada.

The kids kept pouring into the dark dingy playroom. I didn’t see very many adults around, but the house mother finally noticed me. She told me to email the manager and come back later. It took about five days to get a meeting with the manager. She arrived twenty minutes late which is pretty good for India.

“So the police have cleared you to take care of children.”

“Yes. In Canada.”

“That’s good. Some horrible things went down in Canada.”

She was talking about the segregation schools for First Nations people. I guess she herself was First Nations, but in Maine, where she came from, land rights and cultural respect were way better. Although I imagine she realized that I was too young to be directly implicated in the segregation schools, I never asked.

“Well, I think it would be great if you did some exciting Montessori things with our pre-schoolers.” Most of the other kids went to school, including the kids with disabilities. A couple of elders came from the sister nursing home to watch the toddlers, and sometimes some older girls helped out. Otherwise, there wasn’t much programming.

“You’ll be able to model for the older girls how to deal with toddlers without hitting them,” said the manager. 

What a wonderful idea, I thought. I told her I could come Tuesdays and Thursdays from ten until noon.

The first Tuesday, I arrived, the playroom was full. The only adult in sight was a very old lady who paced in and out of the playroom carrying a wooden stick. Probably there were 12 to 15 toddlers, interspersed with a handful of slightly older girls who could have been nine, but looked 5 or 6. Whenever a younger child cried, the bigger girls picked them up and swung them around. They continued to do this after the little ones stopped crying, yanking them on and off the floor and pulling them by their arms. Often this resulted in more tears. When I walked in the room, everyone swarmed me. They wanted to be picked up and sit on my lap. At Montessori, I was not the most cuddly or nurturing of teachers, certainly not at the beginning. I feel like French teachers are some of the more miserable people on earth. I have a saying that goes, All French Teachers Cry in the Bathroom. At the Montessori school I cried in the bathroom. When the kids cried, I wanted to cry too. I would have preferred to do anything else than deal with their tears. Eventually I learned that not dealing with tears would causes long term damage and thus I made a point of somewhat skillfully comforting children when they cried, even when I was grumpy.

At the orphanage, it was a no-brainer since now I have baby cravings and I’ve gone all soft. Plus these poor kids didn’t have parents. So I picked up any kid who wanted to be picked up. Everyone was allowed to sit on my lap. Nobody was wearing very substantial diapers and it didn’t seem likely that very many of them were potty trained. I decided that it was okay if I got peed on, but if someone shit on me, I could go home. Beforehand, I had rubbed tea tree and neem oil onto my hair to prevent lice. Within seven minutes, I realized that this was a lost cause. If anyone had lice, I was getting it.

“Aunty! Aunty!” some of the older kids exclaimed, waving at the ceiling. “Aunty! Camera! Aunty! Camera!” Apparently the house mother or someone was watching over the children from the office. How nice. One of the five or six year old girls in a frilly purple dress grabbed my hands. She had fierce fiery eyes. I could tell that expecting her to have any impulse control was unrealistic. She started crawling up my legs. Then she wrapped her hands around my neck. She was a little old to get picked up, but again, no parents. I decided it was okay.

“Yes, yes,” I said before putting her down.  By now someone had brought out an old rice bag full of broken toys and dumped everything on the floor. There were a couple dozen mega blocks, fewer pieces of lego, three or four dolls shedding their cotton insides, some broken trucks and airplanes, and two notebooks to go between all twenty kids. All this was being mixed with the inevitable pee that was only cleaned up after several requests.

It was an evolutionary race to see who got which toys. Just like in Canada, the most popular activities were building with blocks and chewing on everything else. Fiery purple dress girl was more interested in me. She wrapped her arms around my waist again. Aunty appeared in the doorway.

“Do not pamper her,” she said. “She always kicks other children.” I didn’t think there was much chance of anyone being pampered in that room, but I nodded my head.

My favourite toy was a notebook. Inside someone had written the abc’s. On the front inside cover, there was a blue and green advertisement.

“Not all chemicals are bad,” it read. “Without hydrogen and oxygen, there would be no water.” One of the older girls pointed to these words and over and over again, I read them to her.

At the Montessori school, I felt like the children spent way too much time washing their hands because they’d stuck their fingers in their noses. Some of the kids could never leave the sink. And the staff spent way too much time spraying tables and blocks with Lysol. What do you prefer, folks, the flu or cancer?

That said, as soon as I returned home from the Lysol-free soap-free orphanage, I saturated every inch of my body with thick layers of soap, and I scrubbed.

 

On Thursday, the room seemed a bit calmer. Seven or eight school aged girls were scattered around amidst the toddlers, and an older woman was sitting in a chair in a corner rubbing oil onto each child’s hair.

“Songs?” the older house mother asked me. During my Montessori days, I used to dread circle time. Whenever I whined about it, the Boatman would make fun of me.

“Sounds so stressful,” he would say. Well, it was. If the kids didn’t like the song, which usually they didn’t, they would start rolling around on the floor and being obnoxious. Then I would have to try and reel them in speaking only French, which they didn’t understand. Hopeless and humiliating. All French teachers cry in the bathroom. But at the orphanage, the kids were really into it. Although it took half a century to get everyone into a circle, once we figured it out, everyone belted out the ABC’s like their lives depended on it. I also taught them the chicken dance. It was pretty adorable. The older girls went through their repertoire of Indian songs with tons of actions while the smaller ones watched in awe.

 One girl called out, “Exercise,” and I made up a bunch of exercises on the spot. Then the bigger girls left and it was just me and the little ones and the old lady with the oil. A young mother came in with her new baby. I don’t know if she worked there or not. All the kids sat around her and looked at the little baby sitting in her mother’s lap. Seemed like a brutal tease to me. There was such a noticeable difference between the baby with the mother and the orphans. Their eyes were so different. Suddenly, the mother got a really angry look on her face and wacked the little boy who was sitting beside her in the back. I’m not sure what he did. He wasn’t more than three. He started to cry and I put him in my lap. After the lady left, the kids started playing with broken toys again. Another old lady joined the room. She hit a couple of kids with her stick. I’m not sure why. I really wanted to leave, though somehow I made it until noon. When I got home, I still missed kids.

 

The following Tuesday, the weather was cooler and I wondered if maybe I could take the kids outside. Because of their fragile health, the manager had told me she didn’t want the little ones out in the hot sun. She said that they went out in the morning and evening, but it’s hard to say. Nobody’s gross motor seemed particularly awesome from long hours playing outdoors.  I tried to ask one of the elder ladies if we could go out, but she seemed confused.

“Songs, dance, ABC’s,” she said. “Children like.” Dirty dark room it was. Before I could start my brilliant circle time, I saw that one of the tiniest kids was standing in a puddle urine. The oldest he could have been was eighteen months. His shorts were super wet and the pile of toys was just a couple of inches from the puddle.

“Wet,” I said to one of the staff. She was sitting in a chair eating chapatti and rice.

“Pee? Cloth?” I asked. Already a couple of kids had walked through the puddle and were tracking urine on the floor. The woman put her chapati down, ripped off the little boys shorts and used them to wipe up the pee. I remembered the rules I’d set about pee and shit. The little boy kept continued to play with no pants on. Within three minutes he was shitting on the floor. It wasn’t Delhi Belly poop, but it wouldn’t have been a breeze to pick up with a plastic bag.

“Um, clean?" I asked, pointing emphatically. The kid kept walking around with his dirty bum. The woman with the chapati yelled something at a young girl in the kitchen. Maybe she was twelve or thirteen. She sighed, yanked the little boy by his hand and dragged him to the bathroom.  There she hosed him off without looking at him. In a nearby bathroom stall, a three or four year old was squatting while excreting liquid diarrhea. This boy did have Mysore’s version of Delhi Belly, and I wasn't sure he was old enough to hose himself down properly. There was a sink outside the bathroom but I didn’t see any soap.

“Sick?” I said, pointing to the little boy in the toilet. There was still poop on the floor so I pointed to that too. The girl who’d hosed down the little boy went to the kitchen and came back with a pile of newspaper. She handed me a sheet. What was this for? Was it some sort of toy? Then she knelt down and cleaned up the poop with the newspaper. Only newspaper. I think maybe in India, there is some sort of social stigma surrounding cleaning up shit. Having cleaned up shit professionally for the better part of a decade, I feel no shame and minimal disgust while taking part in the process. But not with newspaper and not when there is no soap anywhere in sight

I used to have this big rant about how kids in the west wear diapers for too long and it is horrible for everybody’s pelvis and for the environment. Now this rant is dead.

I paced around the pee spot, the pooh spot, and all the broken toys.

“Sit,” said an elder with a stick. I didn’t understand how anyone could be in this room and sit down. The kids continued to eat the broken toys, rotating around the room like bees in captivity. A little girl, even smaller than the boy who had pooped on the floor wet her pants. The elder knelt down and gave her a huge wack. She was about to get dragged across the room when I walked out. It was 10:15.

I could have made a meeting with the manager, but then what? Judge her life’s work, buy some Lysol, make a big batch of play dough and then go home for Christmas.  I really liked that kid who shat on the floor. He was one of my favourites. Maybe he’ll be okay. It seems that once the kids start going to school, they do a little better. In the meantime, I really can’t watch toddlers get wacked, for any reason. And going twice a week won’t change much long term. Perhaps this is a cop-out, a way to justify my blissful experience here, which consists of one indulgent leisurely activity after another. Or maybe it was just too much. 

I regularly devour podcasts by Buddhist teacher Michael Stone. Over and over again, he says, “We are all happiest when we serve.” He says that we can’t keep doing our practice just to make us feel good, keeping our blinders on, oblivious to everyone else’s suffering. I am not oblivious, and yet, I am not doing a hell of a lot. Often when I hear Michael’s spiel about service, I cringe and think, please no. I can’t serve. I served when I was nineteen. I’m all done. I’m not happiest when I serve. I would rather stay home and blog about my pubic hair. Let’s hope this doesn’t affect my chances of getting my own orphan when the time comes.

“Who am I and what should I do?” Michael Stone says that everyone who goes to a psychologist is asking one of these two questions, and usually both. Coming to India is the equivalent of going to about seventeen psychologists, and at least a few yoga students here in Mysore are asking themselves these questions. What should we do? Some students are tutoring school kids with special needs. Others volunteer at a centre where young people were rescued from human trafficking. My friend fostered five little kittens, only three weeks old. Already four have died.   Yesterday there was a photo shoot raising money for the kids at the orphanage.  This is a kind initiative and I’m sure it won’t hurt, but I just don’t see how the money will prevent kids from getting hit when they pee on the floor.

All my life, I’ve watched my parents take care of people. They met at a group home for kids whose families were in temporary crisis. Often, my father would bring home young teenage boys. I remember them coming camping with us. At Christmastime, we always had people with nowhere else to go around the table. When I was sixteen, we started providing respite care for Glendon, a young boy with cerebral palsy. Four years later, when his mother could no longer take care of him, my parents took Glendon in as a foster child.  Even after they separated, my dad kept Glendon at his house for four years, while he was working full time as a schoolteacher.

 

Glendon. Rocking out on Lakewood Road

My mom has a bit of a Mother Teresa complex. She feels responsible for fixing everything and feels guilty when she can’t. Glendon is now 21 and almost as big as her. Every week, my mom goes to take him for a walk. But she can’t take him overnight like my father can, because she is too tiny. I always say that nobody loves Glendon the way my mother does. My father takes care of Glendon in a way that doesn’t seem to overwhelm him. As long as my father’s in town, he has Glendon overnight, feeding him, bathing him, and taking him for long walks or for swims in the lake.

I didn’t go to the orphanage to serve, or to be the change I want to see in the world. As I said, I just felt like hanging out with kids. Maybe if I was staying longer I would have done more than just walk away. I keep thinking about what constitutes a reasonable contribution. And how to make this contribution without inheriting my mother’s Mother Theresa Complex or becoming an arrogant and obnoxious white saviour figure. Until I figure this out, my contribution is postponed.

“Let God take care of the world, you take care of your anus.” Pattabhi Jois said this once. It is not one of his most beloved and frequently referenced sayings. He is talking about squeezing your anus until moula bandha works its magic deep inside your pelvis and everything becomes beautiful. Probably he was trying to cure Mother Theresa Complexes. My mother doesn’t know about moula bandha, but she always says, “Let God take care of it.” She has to tell herself this or else she worries constantly about Glendon and all the kids in the world like Glendon, and how she’s not fixing everything for everyone. Bless my mother, and bless everyone out there who is raising money and saving kittens. Bless those little kids eating dirty, broken toys, and you know what, bless the ladies watching them. Whatever blessing means. I conclude with no wisdom, and no real solution. People shouldn’t kill their babies, and I don’t know where else they can leave them. I could say something cheeky about the pull-out method, but I will almost surely end up sounding insensitive and obscene.

God may or may not help. Only taking care of my anus will probably not yield fruits beyond narcissism and neurosis. I wanted all the yoga students to read about the orphans in the hopes that it might cure some of their self-absorption and sacro-iliac angst. This is what the psychologists call projecting. When I was a grumpy French teacher, I used to believe that I was totally dead inside. My experience with kids in India and the orphanage has shown me that there is more in my heart than cynicism, sarcasm and neurosis. I suppose this is somewhat of a relief.

At the yoga shala, our chanting instructor has made some very subtle hints about not bringing loud children to chanting. So now we can chant about sun gods, peace and elephants without being disrupted.  As serene and spiritual as this is, I feel like something is missing.

I still think about kids the whole time.

 

The End.

 

 

Do Not Kill Your Baby

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Compost Girl

How I became the Compost Girl

On Friday afternoon, I took on an act of environmental heroism. One of my bosses was going straight out of town that evening so she didn’t have time to dump the compost at home.  My other boss was overburdened with her own small child, along with a big pile of recycling and laundry bags full of the children’s nap sheets and the dirty rags we use to wipe up their mess and the Lysol. My two remaining co-workers who both have cars didn’t think twice when my bosses said that this week’s compost would go into the trash. But not I.

“I’ll take it home,” I immediately volunteered.

“On the bus?” said my laundry and child-burdened boss.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You’ll get kicked off,” said Co-Worker One with Car.

“No, I won’t. Metro Transit owes me big time.” I explained that I carry around a carefully documented list of all the days that Metro Transit has made me wait excessively in horrible Halifax weather, and the three and a half times they made me late despite my unfailing punctuality at the bus stop. When I die, I will bill Metro Transit for the time and misery they cost me and all the money will go to vegetarian party sandwiches at my funeral. Metro Transit dare not say anything about the compost.

“The other passengers might give you dirty looks though,” said Co-worker Two with car.

“They deserve it for massacring my ears with the hideous music blasting out of their headphones,” I replied smugly.

“Well, that’s very noble of you,” said Co-worker One with Car, smirking.

“Yah, you’re like a superhero,” said Co-worker Two.

“Compost Girl,” said Co-worker One.

Both co-workers with cars started laughing until tears formed in their eyes.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” I said. “I’m just taking one for the environment. I’m an environmentalist.”

“Can you please write a blogpost about this, Compost Girl?” said Co-worker One. “I mean, if you had a blog."

Co-worker One is the only one who occasionally reads my blog. My bosses don’t know about it because my blog is so edgy and controversial that it would definitely get me fired. Add the Adventures of Compost Girl to the existing heaps of menstruation, vibrators and potty training theories and this blog will only get edgier.

I poured the mountains of decomposing napkins, lasagna, Moroccan bean soup, mediocre hummus and whole grain crackers into triple layered Sobey’s bags. There were three bags in all. I lugged the bags down the hill to my bus stop on the Bedford Highway. The bus was nearly empty, but a construction worker and Muslim couple were sitting at the back where I sat down. Nobody looked up when I sat down and as the ripening odours wafted through the back of the bus, the couple continued their faint dialogue and the construction worker kept flipping through his Metro newspaper. The bus driver let me off at the corner of Robie and University Avenue.  I trudged the two kilometres home in Halifax’s standard un-Christmasy foggy drizzle. As I walked, the plastic bag handles dug into my palms and left red creases. After I dumped the compost into the green bin in our driveway, I smelled my hands. They smelled like vomit, but it was nothing a little biodegradable dish soap couldn’t handle. 

The End. 

Notes from 2016: I feel like I did this a second time. On the bus ride home, I'd somehow switched my phone into accessibility mode. I fumbled frantically to try to get Siri to stop yattering away at me. My bus stop came and Siri was still relentlessly dictating all my options which was extremely discombobulating. After I got off the bus, I decided to go the the Rogers store on the corner of Spring Garden Road to see if they could fix it. It wasn't until I'd gotten the customer service people to adjust my settings and finally silence Siri when I realized I'd completely forgotten about the two bags of compost. I must have left them on the floor of the bus. That day marked my last attempts at environmental heroism.

 



Worms. Source

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I fired my psychologist and wrote this post to save you 320 bucks and provide you with almost as many thrills as a Stephen King novel

Maybe it's good when your psychologist pisses you off. Probably a lot of psychologists would say that it is excellent. I am firing my psychologist anyways.

Psychologists are expensive. Most of them are around 150 or 160 bucks a pop. And that's for fifty minutes. Not even a whole hour. They use the last 10 minutes of your session to absorb your angst and take notes.

The love of my life from elementary school is a psychologist now. His name is Alex Crampton. My grade one teacher Mrs. Vanden Bosch said that I was a gifted child, and so after grade one, I got to be in Alex Crampton's grade three class. At the end of the year, the school put on an underwater ocean musical. Our grade three class got to be the starfish. Me and Alex got to say the opening starfish line together. I was thrilled.

"They sparkle and shimmer oh so bright. The starfish is really quite the sight."

Our costumes were big clunky stars made out of bristol board. Mine was yellow and covered with sequins and glitter. At the time, Alex had a big black eye from getting hit in the face with a soccer ball. I thought he looked very cute.

We nailed our lines together. Then all of the grade threes did a little song and dance about starfish. "Star light and star bright, We make such a pretty sight."

Mostly the dance was extending our arms at different angles and wiggling our fingers. The wiggling fingers were supposed to make everyone think of shimmering starfish. Starfish aren't very cuddly. I don't think that Alex and I ever got to touch each other. I would have remembered that perfectly.

In grade eight, I remember writing a story on a computer in the home ec room. It was about a character named Martha. Martha might have been a hippopotamus. I'm pretty sure she wasn't a human.

The story began with,

"A very long time ago, perhaps last Wednesday...."

Perhaps last Wednesday, Martha the hippopotamus or whatever animal she was went for a walk in the forest or did her laundry or some other mundane thing. Alex Crampton read the first paragraph and said,

"Wow, you're such a good writer. I never met another writer like you. You're the best writer I know. Except for Stephen King."

My heart glowed beneath my chest, and then it melted. My cheeks got all red. When I was in grade eight, I used to blow dry my long, thick curly hair. Then I brushed it until it grew wavy and enormous and as thick and coarse as a horse's mane. Underneath my overalls, I wore homemade tie-dyed t-shirts. I wanted the overalls to conceal my nipples. I refused to wear a bra because I was too flat-chested and I thought that people would make fun of me if they saw me wearing a bra when I didn't need one. As far as making it or making out with Alex Crampton, I didn't stand a chance.

I think this might be grade seven. Obviously I also played the violin.

Now Alex Crampton has a beautiful baby and fiancee and a PhD.

I limit my Facebook stalking to about once a year.

When I found out that Alex had his PhD in psychology, I was surprised and somewhat jealous. Alex never seemed to like school that much. He was busy with swimming and girls. Meanwhile, I was a mega-nerd. At grade eight graduation, we all made silhouettes of our heads and wrote down what we wanted to do when we grew up. I wrote that I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher with my PhD.

Now I am essentially a kindergarten teacher's assistant with no PhD.

I throw tantrums on my way to work.

At work, I spend hours with bottles of lysol, spraying tables and blocks so that the children won't get diarrhea. They get diarrhea anyways.

I have also been to way more psychologists than Alex Crampton. It takes a lot of lysol spraying to pay for each session.

I'm sure that Alex Crampton is worth your money.

While Alex Crampton was getting his PhD, I was puking in my mouth. Now I'm puking in my head. My most recent psychologist kindly informed me of this during our last session.

At our first appointment I mourned, "I'm a gifted child, but I'm not doing gifted things." He told me that the hallmark of happy people is that they're in touch with their own values and they chase after these values just like my Big Black Dog chases the raccoon he wants to murder.

For our next session, I had written down all my values. Yoga, the Boatman, my dog, writing. External affirmation, physical health. I turned on my Verbal Machine Gun and rattled off the list to my psychologist, whining and blabbering away between every point. The job with the lysol gets in the way of everything. I will never have enough money. Nothing you do can ever make you happy. I ended the long list of sorrows and grievances and money and lysol with "I really wish my mother had never had me. I am angry at my mother for having me."

"You're ruminating," said the psychologist. "Do you ruminate a lot?"

"Yes," I said. And wasn't it interesting? I used to puke in my mouth, and now there's puke in my head and having an orgasm is very difficult. "I'm a writer," I said. "I talk a lot."

"When you talk that fast, I shut off," said my psychologist. I told him that I thought you were supposed to talk a lot in therapy. He said that therapy wasn't just that. It was about creating a mutual relationship. "And when you talk like that, I feel like I'm not a real person."

What real person charges 160 bucks an hour for a mutual fucking relationship? Being a psychologist and not letting your patient blabber away is kind of like being a prostitute and not giving blow jobs. It's unrealistic and guaranteed to reduce your clientele.

"When you're like this with Robbie, does he turn off?" I admitted that sometimes he does, but I don't pay him, and often he finds me quite entertaining. Then again, he could just be lying because I'm so excellent in bed. 

My psychologist suggested that he let me know when I'm ruminating in session. And that perhaps during my day I could have a bracelet that I can look at when I feel like I'm slipping into a frenzy. A Frenzy Bracelet. Maybe the children can make one for me out of painted macaroni. We can market Frenzy Bracelets and sell them for 160 dollars each.

The other thing he told me to do was to pay attention while walking the dog. I pay lip-service to meditation and mindfulness and yoga, but my head is all over the place and I'm apparently not "walking the talk."

I left feeling like I'd failed the session. Maybe it would be very useful for me to discuss these feelings in therapy. Probably it would be excellent. But like I said, I am firing my psychologist anyways. Who can resist firing someone who makes 160 bucks an hour? When will I ever have this opportunity ever again?

If Alex Crampton lived in Halifax, perhaps I could go see him. I could ask him about his beautiful daughter and fiancee, and how he manages to keep fit. But until Alex Crampton moves to town, I think I will focus on being the best writer he knows except for Stephen King. Maybe I can resurrect Martha the Hippotamus into a brand new short story. 

A long time ago, perhaps last Wednesday, Martha the Hippopotamus had a Frenzy. Then the expensive doctor gave her a macaroni bracelet and she fired him.

The End.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
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What the fuck should I do with my life?
What the fuck should I do with my life? Part Two
High School Reunion