Overheard while walking from my office to the 4' x 5' dorm room which—having lately vacated my parents' Houston basement—I share with four cats, one lovely wife and a library of over 9,000 books:
"So she gave a press conference from her bedroom and she said all about how Henry had left her for an older woman with three adopted kids and tons of puppies who she didn't even know. Someday soon we'll all be doing that."
I suspect this is one of those moments when the 75% of stuff my poor punctured eardrums don't deliver brain-wards contain some significant phonemes, ones whose absence garble words and sentences beyond cognizability. Even if I'm wrong, I doubt the day will come when we'll all have husbands named Henry leaving us for older women with many children and tons of puppies. Of all the grammatical tics in that sentence, I find "tons of puppies" the most amusing. Of course, I also find the fact that woman who gave the press conference from her bedroom wasn't acquainted with any of the puppies. There were tons of them. Surely she had happened on the street one day last December to notice one or two of the three or four thousand puppies eventually purchased by her husband's mistress in a Christmas display downtown?
But maybe I have it all backwards. Maybe we live in a world where all wronged wives will now give press conferences from the bedrooms their husbands no longer occupy, as if to say "This, right here, this is what he has abandoned. This chest of drawers proudly bore his socks and underwear for more than a decade .... this nightstand, the fantasy novels whose covers he declaimed but whose contents he devoured .... this coat hanger, the tuxedo he wore on our wedding day." They would continue until thier connection timed out or the moment they could somehow tell they no longer had an audience. But later: "On this recliner he read the latest Sports Illustrated or Golf Digest. Now he'll find some new recliner, with his new wife, his new children, his new puppies. I will be here, alone, in my bedroom, broadcasting hourly news conferences, constantly updating you, my dear, dear viewers, on the state of my despair."
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