Classic and Confidential Mistakes of the Laziest Bum

A Crusty Toothpaste Production. Written November 2013, relevant today.

I have inflicted upon myself the type of mental trauma that one can only get by binge watching the entire final season of Breaking Bad in a two-day period. One day, I hope there will be therapists that specialize in TV-induced psychoses, but for now I’ll have to resort to writing therapy.

My last few weeks (yes, this has been going on for a solid few weeks now) of near constant Netflix and TV streaming have brought out the very worst in me. I’m unwashed, malnourished, sedentary. I’ve been antisocial and on the brink of falling into the type of mild depression that comes with subjecting oneself to hours and hours of hardcore TV violence and alienating any and all human interaction with the exception of, naturally, the check out lady at the nearest grocery store who keeps me in snacks.

I realized I hit a low point when I was finishing off a box of cookies in my bed and accidentally tipped it over, causing an avalanche of crumbs to fall on my sheets. I have but one pair of sheets and have neither a dust buster nor a vacuum (what am I, rich?) so I proceeded to take my fun-sized lint roller and roll the cookie residue into the garbage can. Three lint roller sheets later, my bed still covered in cookie mistake, I gave up and decided to go full-speed-ahead with a hand sweep. Holding the garbage can between my knees at the edge of the bed, I swept the remaining crumbs–and all evidence of my patheticness, I hoped–into the trash bin.

But I cannot erase the memory of this weekend. For the rest of my life, I will simply have to admit to myself that I once invested in a block of cheese and then proceeded to lay into said cheese with my teeth, chomping off bites as though it were an apple or beef jerky. No matter how straight I made my bite marks, there’s no hiding the fact that these incisions were made with TEETH rather than a knife like a normal human.

Evolution ends with me. Nay, it reverses. My posture is so terrible that I am actually becoming an un-erect human. What were we before homo sapiens? Neanderthals? Orangutans? Well I’m becoming whichever version of human existed before we stood upright. My most favorite position (regular, not sexual) is laying on my bed with my head propped up by three pillows so I can see my laptop resting on my stomach. Falling asleep with a laptop on your lap is the new falling asleep with a book on your chest. When I do sit in a chair my body is so hunched over that it takes, roughly, the shape of a question mark. If our species ends, I will take full responsibility.

Elyssa’s degenerating body in profile

Another thing I’ve easily fallen into is shirking. Colloquially defined as “one of the vocab words I actually remember from high school,” to shirk means to avoid doing something one is supposed to do, such as responsibilities, such as replying to emails from former bosses in a timely manner, such as answering Whatsapp and Facebook messages from dear friends, such as laundry, such as hair washing, such as writing to family members, etc. I cannot tell you how many bridges I’ve burned because I shirk. I don’t mean to do it, and I hate myself for it, but the habit of the shirk is ever so hard to get out of once you slide back into it.

I’m stranded on Bed Island, a victim of video streaming services and blocks of cheese.