Singing the Tsunami Blues

As Huey Lewis put it so well, and to music, years ago: I need a new drug. Food doesn't do it for me anymore. What else is there? I gave up smoking cigarettes four years ago and wouldn't have one if you tied me to a railroad track. Hard liquor makes me nauseous and wine is fine, but after about a glass and a half I get sleepy, but no less sad.

Time was I was awash in endorphins from running--until my hip went south. Pot does not agree with my high blood pressure, and I draw the line at other drugs because you just never know what crazy thing might happen to your brain. Thus, ever since I murdered my dog over a week ago, I have been using food as a buffer between myself and me. Okay, so I didn't murder him, I chose to end his life with dignity and spare him future pain. But still, it was not a natural death and I'm the one who made it happen.

And so I eat. Last night it was the Peeps, and tonight there would have been more Peeps except, as luck would have it, those Girl Scout cookies I ordered arrived this afternoon. I bought them weeks ago from the little neighborhood girl to be charitable, never intending to eat them myself, but then came the dead dog and the ashes in a can and my husband is out of town, and the next thing I knew I was tearing into a box of peanut butter sandwiches. The good news: in an effort to be healthier they now suck, and thus after inhaling only six or seven--they're small--I chucked the whole box into the garbage.

It's not just my recently-dead dog. It's all of Japan. One minute those people had houses and cars and crops and clothing and photo albums and children and kitchens and beds, and the next they were thrashing about in an ocean of gasoline and diesel fuel and getting hit in the head by trucks and farm equipment. If they survived, now they have nothing. If they have intact homes, they have to seal themselves up inside them because of the radiation from nuclear reactor fires. How anyone can complain about anything after seeing that horror on TV, especially from the comfort of their home, eating Girl Scout cookies and drinking wine, is beyond me.

I think that worked. I feel better.