I think this is what they call a "cry for help."

I've never had to hide anything from my old man. Drugs? Never had any. Weapons? He gave me my first ones. Porno mags? He'd take 'em if he found 'em. (True story, happened when my grandmother sent me a subscription to Playboy... but that's for another time.)

True enough, I'm trying to pretend I don't smoke around him, but it's a half-hearted ploy and I'm sure that deep down he already knows.

But right now, I'm scared. He comes home on Saturday, and I'm absolutely terrified.

Before you judge, let me explain: I work eleven hours a week, for $7/hour. That's about $50~60 a week, less taxes. Okay? That's not a lot. It's not enough to buy food, and come out with a profit. Doubly so, since I'm trying to save up enough to make it back to Maryland for a seminar on the 8th; an $80 ticket both ways has a funny way of sucking you dry.

So I have to rely on the old man for food. Which is normal, right? I mean, that's what students, you know, do, right? Expecting your parents to provide feed is a reasonable expectation?

This week he left three frozen pizzas and some bagel bites. And I was ecstatic. Because this is more food than he has ever left me ever. Dead serious. You know how I survived high school without starving to death? I got addicted to drugs that kill the appetite. And I was dizzy a lot. But not this week! No, for this week, my house was all but laden with ready food: frozen pizza, instant noodles, and cake.

Well that's awesome for about a day.
By the second day, it gets old.

By the third day, you wish you could remember what color oranges are.

The vitamin deficiencies start causing nosebleeds by day six.


Day ten is my favorite. Get this: Your eyes start turning yellow. Only happened to me once or twice, though, and you never have the foresight to plan it for haloween.


Look. I'm not a health freak. At least, not in the normal sense. Health is not, per se, one of my top priorities - I mean, it's up there, yeah, but it just got beat out by money, fame, partying, bad action movies, that new mario soccer game, and wild sex. I don't sleep, I certainly don't eat well, and sometimes I go cold turkey on coffee or cigarettes just because the withdrawal's fun. I absolutely won't see a doctor unless I'm covered in skin lesions, or coughing up blood. Chunky blood, not just some red spittle: I'm not a pussy.

Anyway, point is, I don't really pay attention to what's going into my body. I'm no stranger to classy food, it's true, but I'm best pals with being hungry, and somewhere between high school and college my power animal changed from a penguin to a rat. You'd think that'd make me really detest people who won't eat food because it isn't "Just So," but it's actually done a lot to help me raise my tolerance. They're my favorite people in the world to eat with.

Alright, maybe not a penguin. Probably a fox. Probably still a fox, but whatever; it's just a metaphor.

Well, vitamin deficiency sucks, and coupled with insomnia it can get to you real quick. The usual hallucinations of Sumner Redstone crawling through my window with a dead owl in his mouth gave way to very vivid images of my half-rotted body trying to swat flies away from an open gash with swollen, artery-clogged hands, something you could really live without seeing ever.

At some point, you have to snap and call "enough." The half-rotted thing really did it for me.

I walked down to the local Safeway (literally chased half the way by a storm that snuck up on me and ran me down faster than I could walk), bee-lined for the organic foods section and bought myself some packages of cooking tofu, some organic curry sauce, and a tofu snack. I also picked up some vegan chilli on a whim.

It's not that I'm switching sides, or anything - far from it; I'm still 100% a meat eater, totally human, through and through - I just need to detox a little bit, that's all. But I'm afraid my old man won't see it that way... I'm worried that he'll open the fridge when he gets back, see the big "O" on the organic food packages, and that will be that. Two days later I'm alone and naked in a Louisiana swamp, and the last thing to hear me speak will be some fucking alligator that any reasonable, god-fearing man should have turned into a handbag long ago.

For now I've put everything in an old plastic container and disguised them as leftovers, but that can only work for so long; the actual food can't last forever, and sooner or later some midnight scrounger is bound to look through even the leftovers in a fit of desperation; I can only hope that when that happens I'll be able to pass it all off onto my stepbrother, as the result of some frat hazing or suchlike.