vituperation

September 20, 2002

Certain portions of most of my weekdays are pretty unchanging.

I generally wake up between 3:30 and 4:30, put on a shirt, comb my hair if I’m going outside, and wander downstairs. On the ground floor, I head out to the garage and either put on some shorts and grab my Walkman if I’m hitting the asphalt, or futz around with my charts if I’m lifting weights. I work out.

After my workout, I go back inside and either have a Met-Rx MRP or a big glass of water, depending on what I’ve done for a workout, and vegetate in front of the computer for a bit, checking headlines and such. When I’ve finished whatever I’m consuming, I put the glass in the sink and lay on the couch until 6:21 if I don’t doze off or roughly 6:21 if I do.

Shut up, it’s my ritual, not yours.

I take my shower, get ready for work, kiss the wife, then head back downstairs to pack my breakfast and lunch. This is where our story begins.

Wednesday morning was like other mornings. Before I left for work I packed oatmeal, strawberries, and cottage cheese for breakfast. For lunch, I loaded up a grilled Fredburger, fixin’s for said burger, a nice big salad, and a couple of pluots (plums and apricots, cross-bred; truly one of the best fruits ever. I love pluots.). Work was busy, as always. I had breakfast around 10:15 and by 1:30 I was more than ready for lunch.

I got my lunch out of the refrigerator in the kitchen at work and set about putting my Fredburger together. The patty went into the microwave for 45 seconds while I arranged bread, spicy brown mustard, lettuce, tomato, and onion on a paper plate. I reached into my lunchbag for my pluots, because on days when I have a paper plate lunch, I like to make a little presentation out of it, because I am lame.

I only found one pluot in the bag.

I searched the bag again, to make sure I hadn’t missed it. This wasn’t terribly difficult, given that the only thing in the bag was a Tupperware container of salad. No pluot. I went back to the refrigerator and checked around in there, thinking that maybe the pluot had tried to escape my lunch and might be hiding behind the milk that expired when Clinton was President, waiting for an opportunity to make a mad dash for the front door and freedom. No pluot. I dropped to my hands and knees, looking under the refrigerator for my missing pluot.

My search was fruitless.

I walked back to the table where my lunch was spread out and looked around for my pluot. I rechecked the lunch bag, thinking that perhaps I’d simply overlooked the pluot in all that emptiness. I looked in the microwave, wondering if maybe I’d somehow put the pluot in there with the Fredburger patty. I hadn’t. I crawled among the empty 5-gallon water bottles under the table, sure that I’d just dropped the pluot when I got the bag out of the fridge and it had rolled over here.

I came up empty-handed.

For good measure, I checked all around the refrigerator a second time - again under the foolish premise that it might’ve maybe felt pity on me and magically appeared. It hadn’t. I walked slowly down the hall from the kitchen to the back of the suite, where I come in every morning, scanning the ground constantly for my errant fruit. I never saw it. In the conference room where the back door to the office is, I stopped and crawled around under the conference table. All for naught.

I love pluots, have I mentioned that?

I checked the back parking lot all around my Jeep, even though I wasn’t sure if I’d eat the pluot if I found it there, all warm and soft. Okay, who am I kidding? Of course I’d eat it. If I found it there, that is. I didn’t. I opened the Jeep and checked all around the front seats, under the front seats, and in the back seat. Twice.

No pluot was to be found.

Finally, I went back inside to have lunch, my head hanging low over the loss of my little pluot buddy. I knew I still had one to eat, but lunch just isn’t the same with only one pluot. As I sat down to eat, I had a thought that might help me resolve the case of the missing pluot, because it was really bugging me. I called home. Robyn answered.

“Did you by chance find a pluot laying on the counter?” I asked, trying to contain my emotions.

“Yes, I did,” she said, “and it looks so good I’m about to eat it for lunch.”

My wife is a bastard.