Talking to Myself (Cigar Smoke 4-8-10)

OK, I talk to myself. And not only that. I answer myself. You may ask why I talk to myself. And I may answer, because my self is the only one that will talk to me. Can you hear that little slurping sound? That is the sound of all the shrinks in Pasadena licking their lips.

And not only do I talk to and answer myself, I talk to the imaginary people I have conversations with and answer them, too. Let me give you a recent example. I go into my favorite coffee place the other day, and I am carrying a container of yogurt with me. As I am going up to the counter to order my coffee, I say to myself, “Self, is it OK that you are carrying a little container of yogurt that you have not purchased here, because they don’t offer any little yogurt containers?”

But then I think the manager will see me and he will say, “Uh, excuse me, yogurt carrier, but do you think, maybe, you could buy something from us since you are in our store and we are a small business trying to survive in this suck economy, and we are providing you with a comfortable and safe place, cleaner than your house, to drink your coffee and lead a nice middle-class life?”

And I say to either him or myself, I can’t quite figure out whom, “Well, what if I just bought a cup of coffee and I wasn’t carrying a cup of yogurt with me, would I then be considered a responsible patron?” The answer remains a mystery because, obviously, the manager has never even heard my imaginary question and I myself do not know what the answer is, although I lean toward being on the side of myself.

So I get my coffee and I go to my table and sit down. I take my yogurt in one hand and I notice that the top of the yogurt container has a little secondary container of nuts attached to the top of the main yogurt container. Are you with me? (I would talk to you more about this, but I don’t want that many people in on the conversation with myself.) So I take the nuts container off, and I notice that there is a tinfoil lid on the yogurt container. And that there is a little tinfoil flap on the tinfoil lid that you have to pull up to gain full yogurt access.

So, of course, I pull up on the flap, and I hear this little spritzy sound and a glob of strawberry yogurt squirts out and lands on my shirt. It kind of startles me. (I startle easily.) And I lean my head back to look at it, and I notice the guy next to me looking at my yogurt glob on my shirt. And then he notices me noticing him, and he looks away like he hasn’t really seen my yogurt glob. And then I quickly talk to myself and wonder if I should acknowledge somehow that I know he saw my yogurt glob, and tell him that I’m usually a person whose shirts don’t have yogurt stains on them, and that this was just a one-time act of sloppy and careless flap-lifting. Or maybe I should just tell him to just buzz the hell off, or maybe even walk over and smear some uneaten strawberry yogurt all over his Dockers. I talk myself quickly out of that last option. Because I am a sane, civil human being? No. Because he’s bigger than I am.

So now I am sitting there with a yogurt glob on my shirt and a flap full of yogurt on the underside of its lid. So I ask myself if I should lick the lid. And, of course, my self says I should. So I lick the lid, and then place it licked-side-down on one of my napkins. And I can’t help myself, but I glance over to see if my favorite yogurt-glob observer has seen me lid licking. Thank God he hasn’t; that saves me one imaginary conversation.

So then I grab the little container of nuts, which has its own little flap on it. But this damn flap is too small for me to get my semi-fat fingers to pull on, and I have to use my teeth. But before I use my teeth, I ask myself, “Self, should I use my teeth? Self, is using teeth to pull nut flaps off a yogurt lid in a public place OK?” And apparently my self has given me the OK, because I start using my teeth like a pirate.

So now I empty my little packet of nuts into my strawberry yogurt, and I am all set to thoroughly mix my nuts, which are on top of my yogurt, deep into the yogurt beneath the nuts, and then finally eat my evenly distributed nut yogurt and drink my coffee and lead a relatively happy life.

But then I realize something — I do not have a spoon. No frigging spoon. My head drops to my chest, just missing the yogurt glob.

I sigh a long, audible sigh. I ask myself if I think the manager would give me a spoon to eat snuck-in yogurt not purchased in his store. I answer myself that he would probably use a phrase that had “over my dead small-business owner’s body” in it.

So I ask myself if you can eat nut-filled yogurt with one of those little coffee-stirrer piece-of-crap thin wooden dealies. My self said, “No, but if you use two of them together, it should work pretty well, Dummy Butt-Face.”

Well, my self was right. It did work well. But why would my self call me “Dummy Butt-Face?”