by Shai Nir

It’s a sad thing that as a society we worry so much. We wake up and worry about our breakfast, worry about our drive to work and how awful traffic will be, worry about how work will go, whether we’ll have time for lunch, whether we’ll get fired come 5 PM; worry about the drive back and how awful traffic will be, worry that we’ll come home to find our significant other in bed with our best friend, or their best friend, or both; worry about having to pay for a divorce and the fact that divorce rates are so high nowadays, and we really aren’t doing anything to help, are we; we worry about whether we should go out for dinner or just get delivery because what if the delivery guy has an accident; we worry about missing the best parts of Dancing with the Stars because what was supposed to be a 60-second tinkle might turn into a half-hour deuce dropping session; worry that some wasted celebrity might plow through our living room wall and it’ll be all over the news and all the neighbors could catch a glimpse of the four foot tall painting of Judge Judy in S&M gear that we keep in our closet because it’s the only way we can get off while watching Skinemax; we worry about the fact that that’s the only way we can get off and doesn’t that make us a freak; we worry over whether our neighbor might sneak into our bathroom while we were away and wipe our toothbrush with their taint as revenge for that time we put a three-inch cockroach into their fridge, worry that they might notice the Tabasco sauce on the toothbrush; we worry that our soon-to-be-ex might tip the cops off to the drug stash we keep inside our hollowed-out Sega Genesis, but not before taking all the good stuff and half the okay stuff; we worry that as we curl up in the fetal position in our bed, or a jail cell, or some gutter, or a freight ship bound for Nicaragua, we’ll try and try to cry ourselves to sleep, but sleep might never come because we’ll spend all night worrying, and if we ever do manage to fall into some sort of slumber we’ll just end up dreaming that we’re worrying about things that make even less sense, like whether the bear that our left leg turned into wants to eat the deer that used to be our right leg, or praying to our deity that might not exist that we’re falling into a bottomless pit, rather than one with a bottom, because whatever is at the bottom must be worse, and we worry that we’ll wake up from a dream like that and think we might be crazy so we’d go to our therapist but she’d turn into a talking raspberry and it would turn out to be just another dream; we worry that we worry so much that we might worry ourselves to death about worrying ourselves to death, and then we have breakfast.