Thursday, September 21, 2006

My girlfriend Adelphia’s hot. I wouldn’t kick her outta bed.

Or would I?

Very often she’ll lay in bed with me, still wearing her evening clothes. After a long night of dinner, drinks and what-not, there she’d be, in another sexy cocktail dress, both of us nearly dozing off. But no matter how tired she is, she won’t yet allow herself to stay that way. Adelphia’s gotta get up at some point -- sometimes hours later -- and do her evening rituals first. She can’t go to sleep ‘til she does. Which means I can’t go to sleep either.

We’re in limbo. Dreams deferred.

One night she had changed into her little t-shirt and pajama bottoms, and I was impressed. Not only at how cute she looked, but for once she had settled in right away.

“Not quite,” she said. “I still have to take out my contact lenses.”

So why didn’t she? Why lay down with this final task still to be done? Why was she keeping me in limbo? We were both exhausted, so her tendency to procrastinate before bedtime didn’t make any sense to me. “C’mon, baby. Take out your contacts.”

“My ‘clown-tacts’?”

“What?”

“You said ‘clown-tacts’. What are ‘clown-tacts’? Are those prescription lenses for a clown? Is Chuckles the Clown nearsighted or farsighted?”

I was so drowsy, I must have mispronounced the word. She, on the other hand, was still wound up, as talkative as ever. And purposely procrastinating, perhaps to provoke me.

“What about Ronald McDonald? I never saw him wear glasses, so I wonder if he got clown-lasix…”

“106, 105, 104…”

“Are clown-tacts covered on the circus health insurance plan? Who do the Ringling Brothers use for an optometrist?”

“92, 91, 90…”

“Can anyone get clown-tacts? If you wear clown-tacts, will everyone look like a bozo to you?”

“81, 80, 79…”

“What are you counting down?”

“You got 108 seconds,” I said.

“You mean like on ‘Lost’?” Adelphia had gotten me hooked on that show, and the second season featured a ticking clock that counted down from 108 minutes. But she would only get 108 seconds.

“And unlike the show,” I said, “you can’t reset this clock. So you got -- now, 53, 52, 51… seconds to go off on your little riff about clown-tacts.”

“What happens when you reach zero?”

“On ‘Lost’, it may have meant the end of the world, maybe not,” I said. “35, 34, 33… But do you really wanna find out?”

Apparently she did.

She said, “Y’know, maybe you meant ‘clown-‘ttacks’, like when Krusty goes berserk or something. Clown-‘ttacks can be very dangerous. You could get hurt by too many pies in the face during a clown-‘ttack, and that could knock a clown-tact out of your eye…”

Adelphia kept going. All the way to 3, 2, 1, zero.

And that’s when I started shoving her out of the bed, shuffling more and more onto her side, until she fell off the edge, laughing.

“Fine, I’ll go take out my lenses.” She got up off the floor and started storming out of the room. “I can’t believe you kicked me outta bed.”

“Small price to pay for joking around,” I said. “Consider it a clown tax.”

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