ORANGE WATER

Every morning, as I have for years and years, I hobble down the stairs, pour a quarter-glass of orange juice, and top it off with water. I've had trouble drinking straight water ever since my old Bon Appetit magazine client informed me that fish fornicate in it.

Bon Appetit's ex-editor-in-chief was a portly man: more gourmand than gourmet. He enjoyed the finest foods and drink and was a living billboard for his advertisers' products. Water was way too much a commodity for his epicurean tastes, and he was no stranger to the bottle, always taking his drinks "neat."

He died of a heart attack in his late 40's, but I digress. I've had trouble trying to visualize what a fish-eye view of fornication would even look like, but water has never seemed quite as appetizing ever since. Somehow, the acidity of the orange helps the water go down, and it helps me forget about the frisky fish.

This morning, though, I clumped down the stairs, poured the quarter-glass of OJ, and filled the rest with... milk? Wow, that was interesting, I thought to myself. You poured in milk. Where did that come from? We a little distracted, are we? I asked myself. The Twilight Zone jingle ran through my head.

As I was thinking about this, I noticed I had just put my metal coffee mug in the microwave and it was arching.

Yikes, I never do that. Just when I said, okay, we're focusing now and this nonsense is over, I realized that, in the midst of my declaration, I had fed the dogs Honey Nut Cheerios. They were delighted, but I had intended to give them the Science Diet kibble in the large 30 lb. silver bag.

Starting to think this was never going to end, I looked down and noticed my cereal bowl filled to the gunwales with hard brown chunks. An honest mistake I thought, but how unappetizing they looked floating in all that milk.

Wow, I thought. Was this the big A? Was the old head processor losing a few chips? Or was the stress of living through two Bush presidencies starting to get to me? Just as I was heading for the gingko, my mind wandered off into the nature of distraction.

Like, for instance, how does one dis-distract oneself when one has to distract oneself to focus on not being distracted? As I questioned this, I noticed that something was very wrong with my tee-shirt.

I could see from my reflection in the microwave (where I was trying to focus my eyes on the replaced microwavable coffee cup turning in circles), that my tee-shirt was clearly inside-out. I knew it was inside-out because the type on the front of the shirt was right-reading. My scientific mind knew this couldn't be so.

Pondering the fun of being able to read right-reading type in a reflection, I discovered my shoes didn't match. That's bad -- much worse than mismatched socks, which I'm often told I have -- though I only buy one brand of black socks so I don't know how that could be --but I digress.

Just when I was thinking I would have preferred seeing two different kinds of loafers on my feet -- rather than a loafer and a sneaker -- I felt the strongest need to head for the computer.

Of course, I hadn't actually been distracted at all. Everything was fine. All systems were "go." No need for an ambulance. I had simply been writing in my head the Pinecliff Network Life column for today. The moment I sat down at the keyboard, the story just spilled out like orange milk from a tilted glass.