The COVID pandemic brought one unexpected but appreciated change to our lives at home. When you’re not out among your fellowman as often or as closely, you might quickly drift into a less frequent bathing regimen. You’re more on a self-sniff schedule in setting those bathing parameters, with a little help from your partner.

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I had a dream.

I was sitting down to eat lunch in a cafeteria with a little boy, and on our trays we each had a square of green jello with cottage cheese in it (I know—nasty stuff). For some reason hidden deeply in my twisted brain, I decided to tell the boy about where green jello came from.

“Did you know green jello comes from squeezing the heads of Presidents? If they’re really smart, you get more of those chunks. But presidents are busy people, so you just don’t get green jello every day.”

The boy carefully thought about this for awhile. Then he said, “Where does red jello come from?”

“Oh, that comes from the tears of the damned. There’s a factory in Indianapolis, but nobody can live within a mile of it because of the screams of the damned. Only deaf people can work there.”

I have no idea why I remembered this in such detail when I woke up, but I figured others might be interested in the latest developments in jello theory.

Our esteemed employer recognizes that investing in preventive medicine is a good thing, saving bigger money down the road. So they contract with an esteemed health-care provider to bombard us with emails about our shitty health habits. They don’t actually know (or aren’t supposed to, anyway) that we have shitty health habits. But, hey, going by statistics of the average American population and adding up the healthcare expenditures for this insured pool, they can make some pretty good guesses. And, shoot, emails are cheap.
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