Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

Breakfast with the Flipper

The word breakfast, outflanked on its left by pre-heated-egg-muffin-sandwiches and on its right by Special K-plus-bowl-add-milk and enjoy, surrendered at last to diet coke plus nothing and retreated into fantasies of the 19th century where it had been told words still retained some semblance of their meaning. Miss with the Flipper advanced, filling her cup with soda as she went.

Coke, Diet 2.6 calories. That would be if she still cared about something as nonsensical as the calories in diet soda, which she didn’t. Two point six would have been rounded up to five and noted carefully down under the category: breakfast in her daily journal. Two point six (rounded to five) would then reoccur throughout the day on scraps of paper or in the margins of school notebooks as she re-counted everything starting again from breakfast, just to be super certain. A total projected daily caloric intake would be there too, below a line of tiny penciled figures, and it would be gradually revised downward as the day progressed until it reached about five hundred. Perhaps eight, if she was really trying.

Breakfast for the anorectic is not so much a meal but a condition entered into upon waking which lasts until, approximately, two-thirty in the afternoon. Or four pee em, if one is making a proper effort. Miss with the Flipper has not made such an effort for a wearyingly long time now. She could not tell you to the decimal how many calories she had for breakfast. She doesn’t count such things or keep a running total in her journal. Really the best she could do would be to estimate roughly that yesterday she ate approximately sixteen hundred calories.

Anyway, that’s breakfast sorted. An objection could be entered into the record on behalf of the word “with” as well. A modest preposition, with would not ordinarily be the sort of word to quibble. However there is a question of proximity (not to mention propriety) in applying the word “with” to the case of writing an email response to someone who is not, has never been, and never will be in the physical presence of the emailer.

Miss withthe Flipper rolls her eyes at this. Only a pedant would argue grammar. Flipper might like to argue with her grammar. It reminded her of the way the mole-faced Mrs. Fowe, her third grade teacher, used to insist on parts of speech while she embellished eyes and faces in the voids of Os and zeros in her spelling book. It hardly made a difference what games she played to make the time go faster. Miss Flip always knew all the answers anyway.

If there is a similarity between the child-girl and the adult it must be the way both of them always had the answers. Miss Flip can argue breakfast, with, and even “The Flipper”; which isn’t a name at all but rather the an alias for a nonexistent person. A marvel of this electronic age, she thinks, that one can argue with nonexistent people and have them answer you in the glowing rectangle of your laptop computer. Non-breakfast would be a sad affair indeed without its company.

Perhaps the Flipper would pronounce it a sad affair regardless. Diet coke and email is an acquired taste as breakfast. Flipper had a whole freezer full of bison meat, or so he claimed. If that was true he’d hardly be the type to enjoy sugar-free fizzy water in the morning.

Most likely that claim had to be true, she thought. Who would make up a freezer full of Bison? Well, but who would pretend to be a Nigerian bank manager who needed to deposit a certain amount of money into the bank account of a sufficiently trustworthy American? For that matter, who would claim to be a lesbian science fiction writer? Of the three unlikely email presences at least your average Nigerian had a clear and perfectly understandable motive. No doubt he needs the money too, poor skinny African bugger. Do they have the internet in Africa? Do they have things like banks and telephones and electricity? Surely they just lay about all day starving to death, waiting for rich Europeans to take their picture like some ghastly Parisian fashion models.

Really, Flipper can’t stand accused of having ulterior motives in showing such an interest in our heroine. She’s just so dazzlingly brilliant and witty; anyone making her acquaintance, electronic or otherwise couldn’t keep from being drawn to her. He claims that he’ll stop drinking again after the Holidays. Miss Flip quietly suspects the word of a drunk to be somewhat unreliable on this topic.

Anorectics are more like drunks than the drunks might be comfortable acknowledging. Self-obsessed, highly strung, terrified of nothing so much as the content of their own heads which they’ll do anything to silence temporarily. If they can damage their grey matter permanently so much the better. Miss Flip remembers all the times she seriously considered the prospect of permanent IQ loss as one of the upsides of restricting calories. And alkies may put on a better show with their punched walls and broken furniture but for sheer unrelenting anger and resentment no one beats an anorectic.

Another point: you shouldn’t put odds on either of them remaining too long in recovery.

Drunks have a good deal, in recovery, when you think about it. Church basements, a jovial atmosphere, a guarantee of something which works- if they work it. Put a group of anorectics together and they’ll race each other to the feeding tube. They’ll fill the internet with sticky traps to ensnare a new generation of junior highschool dieters. Anorectics aren’t very nice people at all, really. Miss Flip hates them with a passion when she isn’t wishing she could just go back again. Just once more, for all the marbles. She’d really show those bitches how it’s done, this time. If only she thought that she could handle it.

That’s why the single most important fact for her to keep in mind is that she can not handle it. However gigantic her ego, regardless of whether she’s always has the answers. She. Can’t. Handle. It. Not for a few pounds, not for a few months, not just until the holidays or until all her best clothes start fitting. Once she starts that way she’ll keep on going until she’s in a hospital, or ought to be at any rate. She can’t handle it. Not again. In fact she’s not so Flip now, when she thinks about it that way. Odds are she might not make it back next time. Odds are her luck’s been pushed. Best she take care lest she push too far, while thinking she can handle it.

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