countdown to the oscopy

[a work in progress]

See "gallows humor" for the backstory.

24 hours, twenty minutes
I've begun the Great Apple Juice Drink-off of 2005. The only pain I'm feeling is regret, for the juice is stocked in a fridge overflowing with Christmas bounty, which I struggle to not think about whenever tippling. The real fun starts later this evening, when I have to drink a twenty ten-ounce bottle of green liquid to start the laxative process that will continue well into the morning. But none of that now. Now is the time to blog, to revive a waning Sudoku addiction, and, mostly, to savor the sweet goodness of generic apple-water.

18 hours
1. Chicken broth ain't all that.
2. The Sopranos is a forty-eight minute food commercial. They're eating in every other scene. At least one new pasta per episode.
3. The Bank Dick clocks in at seventy-two minutes. Why don't they make short movies these days? Phone Booth is the last contemporary film I remember seeing that was under ninety. Probably seventy, eighty percent of recent cinema would be recognized as ingenious if the director found a way to lop off fifteen minutes. (Syriana is probably the worst offender.)

16 hours, 19 minutes
I down the entire ten-ounce bottle of green goodness. A disappointment: the elixir gets its color from the bottle. It's actually clear, lemony, almost pleasant--imagine someone dumping a saltshaker into your Sprite as a joke. I won't blog what's going to happen in a half hour or so. Suffice it to say that magnesium citrate is a laxative.

13 hours, 23 minutes
For the record, that's a different James Anderson.

13 hours, 14 minutes
Sing along with Buddy Hackett!

Shipoopi! Shipoopi, Shipoopi
The girl who's hard to get!
Shipoopi. Shipoopi, Shipoopi
But you can win her yet.

3 hours, 4 minutes
"Borborygmus" is the goofiest example of onomatopoeia, ever. This morning it's a symphony of rumbles, clicks and whistles, as if someone has stuffed a gray whale in my gut.

The order of business: shower, shave, suppository, at-home-enema, then two minutes down the street to Group Health for the flexible sigmoidoscopy.

28 minutes
I'll spare the details of the last two hours. I will say, though, that my wife is very, very brave.