I have a new bed.

It's true — I have a new bed. You may notice a bit more spring in my spiel today, or perhaps a sly smile playing about my predicates. We'd been sleeping on a mattress that was the chiropractic equivalent of taking a tumble down an interior wall of the Grand Canyon, and my arm had started to fall asleep so badly every night that I'd begun to have dreams where the flesh had turned mustard yellow and hung heavily at my side like a thirty-inch Cotechino. The situation was simply not tenable. Fortunately, we accumulated some money, and shortly thereafter we went to a mattress shop.

Have you ever bought a new mattress? It's a curious ritual where you walk into an enormous room, and a salesman looks at you while you lay on ten different mattresses which all feel more or less the same, and you say out loud "I have no idea what I hope to gain by any of this," and he says that the Sealy "Salome's Garden" has a seventy-five dollar rebate, and the next day two strong men show up at your house with a "Salome's Garden" and a mis-matched box spring. They haul away the old mattress, which is easily folded into a taco shape, and take it to a lab that uses liquid chromatography to analyze how gross your life is. I am anxiously awaiting the results; I fear that I am "very gross" because ever since the baby came I have not been exfoliating quite as much.