When I realized that I am not James Thurber and never would be, I stayed at the bar too long, had too much to drink and wound my way home to unwind. In my diminished state, I hung my hat on my wife and kissed the hat rack before collapsing next to the bed.
The bed promptly fell.
The next morning, to my disappointment, I did not find my ex-wife looming over me atop a bookcase. This is, in part, due to the fact that I have only been married once but this scarcely softened the blow.
At breakfast, my actual only wife refused to intimidate me with snide comments despite my not-so-subtle urgings. She even made me coffee and kissed me at the door before I went to work. The dog failed to look at me dolefully from a corner and instead came up and licked me. That was devastating.
I didn’t really want to go to work. I’d have preferred an endless series of dinner parties and social gatherings, something with more suitable possibilities for exploring the human condition. But I haven’t been to such gathering since the 1940s, decades before I was born.
I’ve had enough. I’m leaving for Africa to search for Dr. Millmoss who, rumor has it, was consumed by a piano-shaped hippopotamus.