Burt’s Bees Are Angry!

It should be said that I am a guy who lives life on the edge. Not in the way that those mountain climbers out West, who’ve been missing for over a week after attempting to scale a great wall of ice at 8,000 feet. Oh no. That’s too easy. The dangers obvious and straightforward. No, I prefer the subtle and many layered dangers of everyday life.

Take my choice of life-mate for example. I could have picked a more vanilla model. Something from the brown haired, brown eyed Jr. Fidelity Management Executive line. But my lust for danger and subterfuge would never be sated by such a mundane though tasty flower. Why pick daisies when you can pick the corpse flower? So I went with (or more accurately- was accepted by) the chemically unstable redheaded Irish poet model.

(See the pic of Debbie Wiley-Vawter, curator of Virginia Tech’s biology department greenhouse.)

So we’re sitting at the dinner table the other night and I notice yet another addition to my wife’s growing collection of Burt’s Bees Inc. products sitting there, nestled between my beer and the steak sauce. Burt’s is Dorinda’s new girl-product fetish.

Is that normal? Woman buys new product, it doesn’t make her skin catch fire or break out in puss filled sores, so she buys EVERYTHING that company has even made? Is it just my wife?

Anyway, the Widget also takes note and asks what it is. So I read off the label, “Rosewater & Glycerin Toner: for sensitive and mature skin.” At her bemused look, (and feeling a little heady after a good meal), I translate it into English for her. “Its face tightener.”

Can you just feel the danger in the air? The kitchen was electric with it, and my hunter’s instinct where confirmed by the jarring crash of a fork falling onto a plate.

Now more timid me would return to camp, proud and blustering with yes another successfully delivered zing in the bag. But seeing the blood rush to my dear hearts face and that really cute wrinkle that she gets between her eyes when she’s contemplating violence begin to form I move in for one last jab before retreat.

“Its for when your skin starts to sag,” I elaborate.

Now, sometimes I can be too bold and daring for my own good, and after eight years of battle Dorinda has become a worthy opponent. No more will she fall for the “retard test”, or smell my ice cream to see if its gone bad. No. Not anymore. And so while I dodged her diversionary attack with the parmesan cheese bottle I was blinded to her true strategy.

Let me tell you, it takes a long time to dislodge a three-pronged fork from the back of your hand, what with all those little bones and tendons in there. It’s a good thing I was sitting to the right of her, or my work hand might have been damaged.

In all truth, I don’t have any idea what she needs the stuff for. She looks better than most girls I meet who are a decade or more younger. She’s just got one of those faces that will always be beautiful, y’know? But then, back in her crime fighting days as the fashonista vigilante High Fashion Girl, she was one of those exotically gorgeous women who was tall, skinny, and ate twinkies and hot dogs three meals a day. Typical outfits when we dated were: poofie prom skirt, knee high Doc Martins, and a ratty old Sugar Cube’s t-shirt, or if going out on the town, no shirt at all and just some electrical tape across her pretty, teacup shaped . . .**COUGH**

*Ahem!* Anyway . . .

So yeah, after acting as host to the body wrecking parasite we lovingly call the Widget, her body has changed, and she gets a little touchy. And I get a fork in the hand.

Now, unlike Dorinda, I look like a sack of potatoes. Friends (I have no doubt at all) will confirm this. There was a great year when I turned thirty where I was dieting and going to the gym like a mad person and I looked great. Better than I had in my entire life.

But since starting this art thing, and having to work my life around the schedule of a half-day kindergartener I have gone to seed in a BIG way. Like a 35lbs and climbing sort of way. I was brushing my teeth the other day and I felt a funny sensation. Something was hanging over my belt and I was feeling a draft. Looking down to see if perhaps my shirt was tucked into my underwear or something I shrieked in horror.

IT WAS ME!

Some crazy ass basketball had been forced through my naval while a slept! WTF!?!

Maybe I can rub some of that rosewater and glycerin tonic on it? Y’know, just to tone up a bit.