You procrastinate. You study for every exam the night before. You prepare for every meeting that day. But somehow you succeed. Wildly. You are respected and known. So much so that they tap you to head the winter Olympics coming to your hometown. They appoint you five years before the Games. Does anything really take five years to prepare for? A year in, it is still four whole years away. A whole presidential term for chrissakes. With three years to go, you consider lobbing in a call to a couple of construction guys, get some estimates on a bobsled course and somesuch, but then the ex-wife rings your cell with some pain in the ass problem. Three years is 36 months. That’s a buttload of months.

“Why, how deliciously morbid!” said heavyset dowager Belinda Buxingham as she peered through lorgnette eyeglasses at the stout black box in front of her: The Predict-O-Ma-Tron! A thrill of exquisite, almost sensuous pleasure ran through her plump body and caused a single, elegant peacock-feather sticking out from her ornate headband to tremble rapturously.

“And you say it’s never been wrong?” Belinda looked up through the aforementioned eyeglasses at Montgomery R. Whistlingcox-Falsborough, their host for this evening.

When he met her at the marina with a single long-stemmed rose and the poem he had written just for her, she said if he didn’t stop she would have to make him marry her. And when they took her daddy’s powerboat out into Florida Bay and he told her not to worry about sharks she said fine, she trusted him. But when they snorkeled and he said that the death of the coral was caused by her father and other men like her father, they argued.

Somebody told me
the Doritos guy
died recently.

Although I wasn’t
paralyzed
at hearing this news,
a sadness overcame me,
one that leaves
a crumbling, artificial
powdered-cheese sensation
in my throat,
with bags of guilt to follow.

Ever stick a vibrator
in your mouth, bite
down, and pull
the trigger?