“We have an opening at 1:30. Can you come in then?” she asked. I told her I could.

I was hungry, so, to start my morning, I had a cup of warm pork gravy, a tuna fish Pop Tart, a leftover slice of turnip pizza from last year, and an old rented bowling shoe full of apple juice. The Siamese twins, Bob and Lefty, were already at school, and I had just kissed my wife goodbye, as she left for her new job at the sausage factory, yanking the teeth out of the road kill before they were tossed into the hopper.

I bundled myself in a blanket on the sofa and turned the TV on. The news had just ended and Regis and Kelly was starting. As Regis and Kelly talked about their boring lives, Kelly’s blouse popped a button, revealing ample cleavage. Quick-witted Regis made a remark about bread dough, and moments later he was carried off stage complaining of heart palpitations and a severe erection.

I picked up the remote and changed the channel to something else. The remote tasted like the underside of the bathroom sink. I stopped at channel 22 and watched CNN. They were showing video footage of the exhumed body of Elvis Presley to prove that he was dead, and to put an end to Elvis sightings all over the world. The suit he was buried in was ripped from the bloating of his corpse, and his signature haircut was still attached to the rotted skin on his skull. Then, someone had an old photograph of Elvis’ teeth and held it up next to the dusty lips barely attached to the skull, and pried open his rotted mouth to reveal the yellowed teeth. A comparison was made. It was Elvis.

I changed the channel again. I stopped at a local cooking show where the recipe of the day was a delicious stew made with skin and meat salvaged from the Humane Society shelter fire. The shelter burned down after an eyewhitnessed occurrence of SFC: Spontaneous Feline Combustion.

I change the channel once again and I stopped at channel 29, TOLS: The Ozark Life Station. Here they showed two cousins, Roseanne and Stanley, making out on the floor of a barn with their shirts off, while chickens and geese ran amuck. The blurry images hid the fact that their family had been inbreeding for generations. The narrative banjo was annoying me, so I changed the channel once again. What’s this? It was MTVid, the music video channel. I stared in disgust as I saw Stevie Wonder singing a song, while all around him there were people throwing things at him, pushing the wrong keys on his keyboard, making faces at him, mocking him, spitting in his coffee, tying his shoe laces together, putting sheet music in front of him, and worse.

When I was done watching that, I changed the channel to TATC: the Take A Trip Channel. They were in Khartoum, the Capitol of Sudan, and they featured television game shows and reality shows based on game shows and reality shows here in America and in the UK. The first one they showed was “Who Wants A Biscuit?” a clear rip-off of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” Then there was “Wheel Of Famine,” a rip-off of “Wheel Of Fortune.” Then they showed “Meal, Or No Meal,” a rip-off of “Deal, Or No Deal.” Then they showed rip-offs of The Biggest Loser, Survivor, and Jeopardy.

Then the phone rang. It was my wife, and she told me to strip the bed and throw the sheets in the washing machine. She said to make sure that I use some bleach but I reminded her that you don’t use bleach on colors, and our sheets are gray. Then she told me that she knew that our sheets are gray but they’re supposed to be white. Then she said that the sheets haven’t been cleaned in more than six months and that her side of the bed still has bleu cheese on it from her birthday party. So, I stripped the bed and bent and shoved the crunchy sheets into the washer.

Then I went back to the sofa and I switched over to channel 35, TSC: The Sex Channel. This episode featured Dr. Harold Goldfarb discussing certain foods that subliminally transmit sexually arousing messages. There are the obvious foods: sausages, sunny-side-up eggs, tacos, clams, cucumbers, and bananas. But Dr. Goldfarb proposed that there are many others: peaches, artichoke hearts, French bread, Candy Corn, kiwis, Cheez Whiz, Banana Nut Crunch Cereal, Little Debbies, Butterfingers, Nutmeg, Slim-Jims, jumbo shell macaroni, fortune cookies, toasted cheese sandwiches, ravioli, pretzel rods, ice cream cones, and many others.

The next channel, 36, was TCC: The Clock Channel. It displayed the time on a large clock on the screen. It was close to noon and was time for me to get ready to go to the doctor. So I took a shower with the dogs and put on clean underpants and jeans and a t-shirt. I couldn’t find my deodorant, so I sprayed Glade on my armpits. It was cold at first, but I smelled good.

When I got to the doctor’s office, I told the secretary lady that I was there and she told me to take a seat. I sat in the only seat that was left, between the dirty wall and a man with bloody gauze stuck in his nostrils. Next to him was an old woman. I thought that she was on oxygen, but after several peeks, I learned that she had tiny tubes secreting moisture into her eyes and mouth. She was unable to generate her own tears and saliva.

I picked up an old Time magazine from the floor beneath my chair and read about Oliver North and the Arms for Hostages Scandal. I put the magazine back on the floor as I thought about all of the sick people who have touched it over the last20+ years. Then I put my hands in my pockets so I made sure I wouldn’t touch anything else.

I looked around the room at the other people and wondered what was wrong with the rest of them. The guy wearing the Sears Appliance Repair uniform had his mangled hand attached to a garbage disposal. An old man had a severe case of what appeared to be neck dandruff. A young and attractive lady had a dislocated jaw, and another old lady, from what I could tell, had a severe reaction to lipstick, and her swollen lips were resting on her lap.

After waiting about ten minutes, my name was called. First stop, the scale. As I stood on the scale, I saw that the person who was weighed before me weighed 527 lbs. My weight was 199 and the nurse lady said that I had gained 8 lbs since my last visit 13 years earlier, and she called me “Lardo!” I was going to give her a dirty look, but she had a clipboard.

She took me to a small room and told me to take off my shirt. “Mmmm!” she said, “You smell like a rain fresh meadow!” I nodded as I realized that the Glade was working well. She took my blood pressure with that thing that squeezes your arm. The tighter the thing got, the more stuff was squeezed out of my arm. “150 over 90!” she said, “That’s very high. What do you eat for breakfast, gravy?” I didn’t say a word. “The doctor will be here in a minute,” she said, and she left.

As I sat there on that padded table with the white paper on it, I looked around at the various charts pinned to the walls: Asthma, cholesterol, the basic food groups, the heart and lungs, venereal diseases, and the digestive system. On the digestive system chart, the area around the rectum and the anus was dirty, as if thousands of hands had touched it over the years.

Over on the counter next to the sink there was a canister filled with cotton balls. As I looked at it, I thought that of all the times I’ve been to doctors’ offices in my life, not once did they ever need to use a cotton ball on me.

Next to the cotton balls was a box of latex gloves and a tube of KY.

Then the door open and the doctor came in.

“What’s seems to be the problem today?” he asked.

I told him that I had a sore throat for a week. He said to say ahh, so I did, and he looked at my throat with his little expensive light.

“Looks like Strep,” he said, and then he said that he needed to do a throat culture. He pulled out a long cotton swab on a wooden stick, and told me to say ahh again. As I did, he swabbed my throat, triggering my gag reflex. Just before I was about to vomit gravy all over him, he pulled it out. I told him that he doesn’t know how close he came to wearing my breakfast. Then he opened his smock and showed me the dried vomit on his shirt.

“See that?” he asked, “A kid vomited on me last week!”

The doctor walked away leaving me to mull over the reason why he was wearing a soiled shirt from the previous week.

Ten minutes later, the doctor came back into the little room and told me that I had a cold or a virus and that I should stay home from work for three days and it should get better.

But before I left, I asked, “Will I be able to play the piano again?”

When I got home, I turned the TV on again and I watched the Spanish version of Mr. Ed. You know, the talking horse. I got tired of it, however, as I realized that Mr. Ed’s lips didn’t look right moving to Spanish words.

Then I fell asleep until the phone rang. It was Lefty. He said that Bob had to stay after school and work on his push-ups and pull-ups for gym class. As I hung up with Lefty, my wife walked through the door with a plastic biohazard bag full of sausages for dinner. I told her that the twins would be a little late, so she lured me into the bedroom for a little fun.