Everybody Outta the Pool

Today is the final day of spring break week from the big obnoxious university. I'm in Phoenix with my fiance Scott, and this is my last visit. Because next time I come here, I won't be a visitor. I'll be moving in. This is the weirdest feeling in the world. I truly feel as though I'm in full jettison mode from one planet to another. More on that as the panic ripens.

The point right now is, the pool has been too damned cold to swim in all week. I've done my best. The water temperature, to be really comfortable and cool and refreshing and delicious is 86 degrees. On the hottest day this week that I tried, tried to get into the water, it was 70 degrees. But I desperately wanted to swim.

I stepped cautiously onto the first concrete step in the pool. This means that only my feet were in the water. At least they had been my feet 5 seconds before. Now they were frozen fish fillets turning vein-blue and pulsating like the penises of madmen. I don't know how those particular penises pulsate. I just wanted to say "the penises of madmen." It's been a dream of mine.

No big deal. I was still gutsy. I wanted to swim. Swimming would perhaps offset the 7 billion calories I'd taken in from the masterful cooking Scott does for the wretch that is me. The wretch who enters her own kitchen only to feed the cat but is quick to gobble up any scrumptious treat the fiance slaps on the table.

I was going to the next step down. Ready, ready...GO.

I did it. I was in up to the knees. My breathing was rapid and LaMaze-like. The penises of the madmen were flailing for life in the arctic acid bath. I started to hallucinate. I saw a legion of mutated fruit flies lined up on the edge of the pool. They were the size of cantaloupes and rubbing their hairy fly-paws together in grim mockery of me. I was freezing, freezing, freezing. I saw the spirit of Nell Carter step out from behind the poolhouse. "Get on in dat water, girlfriend! Don't you be no baby-ass!" I started to compliment her on her attractive muu-muu but just then my ovaries launched up from my pelvis and ricocheted off my brain-pan before they shot out of my nostrils and into the water, slicing through the yellow blow-up raft and leaving two puncture wounds that may as well have come from a Loch Nessian sea snake.

It occurred to me that the water was too cold.

Scott, brave guy that he is, decided to be a man and jump into the deep end. I have never heard the howl of a bludgeoned coyote, but the sound that seeped from his mouth must have been very close. We are still waiting for his testicles to return home. They sent a postcard from the high desert mountains where they landed. It said (they are fond of Pig Latin) "Uck-fay ou-yay, astard-bay!" I just love getting postcards.