Part 86: Ode to a roasted chicken

Life On The Inside is an email newsletter about life with my son who has autism and who has been under house arrest since April 2023. You can sign up here:

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

Harris does accents. Trump serves fries. I can do both. Vote for me and let's be done with this election for God’s sake. I’m sick of the whole thing. 

I’m also hungry. Very, very hungry. This is good because it means maybe, just maybe, for the very first time since I became the Warden, I’ll be able to tuck my shirt into my pants. But it’s bad because as we all know, when one is hungry one becomes short-tempered, jittery, hangry. Willing to risk jail time for the comfort of a warm, roasted chicken snatched and scarfed down right in the middle of Safeway. Or Publix. Or Wegmans. Or even Walmart. Hey, I’ve had some pretty good roasted chickens from Walmart. Just…not…recently. 

To distract myself from my hunger I do all kinds of fun things. I spray self-tanner on my face. This is good for the first day or so. Then by the 400th spray I look like an orange. An orange that went bad three weeks ago. And still, in my starving state, I would eat it. My face, not so much. 

I do laundry. I even throw it in the dryer. When the buzzer buzzes, I race to the dryer hangry it’s not the microwave signaling something hot and delicious awaits me, and fling the contents on the bed. (But only because our washer and dryer are in the closet of our bedroom. Otherwise I’d fling them on the floor.) Then I stand there overwhelmed by the sight of all that is not hot food and toss it back into the dryer. I don’t have the patience. I’m too hungry. 

I exercise. Not easy to do when one is down a quart. Or five. But I try. And it exhausts me. But then I nap. Which is nice. No hunger pangs until I wake up. Plus, another hungry, ‘shit, my pants still don’t fit!’ day passes more quickly. If not comfortably. 

I try to work. Write the company newsletter? Only if it’s about food. Write something for this newsletter? Only if I can work in how much I miss food. Work on NightPrime? Not if the main character’s eating anything!

You might be wondering if this near starvation is doing the trick. Yes, but slowly. Oh. So. Slowly. By the time I’m able to tuck my shirt into my pants you’ll be able to bury me in them. And, with my orange face I’ll be quite the looker. So don’t look. Let’s go with a closed casket, shall we? And please, for God’s sake, serve snacks and a few of those roasted chickens. The Walmart ones are fine.