A dog barks somewhere and you are snapped back to reality.

You find yourself staring at your hands and realize several minutes have passed.

You shake your head in confusion. Then everything sinks in.

You are standing in front of your kitchen sink. And, instead of T.S. Eliot’s  time measurement of coffee spoons, yours is sink-fulls of dirty dishes. It is endless. The word ‘forever’ is applicable.

You tell yourself that it’s all fine and good. It’s all good. It is necessary. Right?

You walk into the other room and turn the children’s programming to French just so you don’t have to listen to the same shit again. You search for an Esperanto version, but then realize that not only is that

language dead, but he joke is lame.

You think about taking up smoking or drinking or amateur shamanism as a way to pass the time and you lapse back into reality: you have no time to pass. Like a watched clock or a kettle put to boil, everything is slowed down.

You think, “Holy fuck” and edit yourself mid-word to, “Holy fucoxanthin”, and you giggle the giggles of the mad. Your inner self pontificates as to why you would substitute a very satisfying cuss word for the description of a carotenoid pigment found in the chloroplasts of brown algae and you stop and something in you makes a popping sound.

That was it.

That was the straw.

The one that broke the back of that poor camel that crazy people won’t shut up about.

And then your wife walks into the kitchen.

She looks up at you from her hand which is holding a pregnancy test applicator and tells you that she is pregnant with your second child.

You look from the sink to your hands to her face and realize you are smiling.

For some wonderfully perfect reason, you are smiling.