Was watchin' Lassie the other day on one of those channels that try to sell you catheters. Timmy was angry at his friend Scott for not caring that one of the eggs Timmy's chicken (ahem) had been sitting on had been abandoned to some kind of crazy, cosmic Easter of stunted eggs that yield neither bird nor omelet.
How would you feel, asked Timmy, if you were stuck inside a shell and nobody cared if you ever emerged? No one celebrates an unhatched egg. They paint it to hide the grimness of a life not lived.
Well, I, dear readers, as painted by the piece I posted last week to mark the anniversary of my heart surgery, am that unhatched egg. But rather than incubating me (Lassie had a subplot about a faulty incubator), you have, with your favorable responses (which exist, not on the page so that others can see them, but in my own repositories of messages), encouraged me to remain inside the shell, to be, metaphorically, a doomed poultry zygote, a clump of cells that will never, in the words of Jonathan Winters on Twilight Zone, "run uphill," will never do or feel. And he was shaped like an egg, so he would know.
You're all Scott to me now.
Okay, I'll make you happy. There's tons more stuff I haven't done in the last few days. I didn't check out the open art studios in Long Island City or get free fruit at their party. Didn't go to see Star Trek. Haven't exercised. And tonight, in just a couple of hours, I will once again not go to the Manhattan Inn to sing karaoke.
And that one I really want to do.
But I feel sweaty.