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Excerpt from mail sent 1998:
Friday evening, I was starting to make mistakes. Calling up a proofreader in Maryland, leaving a message on her machine asking her to send some files--which had arrived the day before. Reporting a problem with our software's Japanese support--but the problem was obviously elsewhere. So I hopped on the bus to go home.
I fell asleep on the bus. Fortunately, my bus only makes two stops: the one where I get on and the one where I get off. I was so tired when I got off the bus.
I wanted pasta, but didn't trust myself to defrost any of the sauce I had cached in my freezer--I could see myself falling asleep while the sauce thawed, boiled, and burned. So I went to the store and bought sauce from a jar. Sauce from a jar. I've never had sauce from a jar that I liked as well as my own sauce. How low had I sunk?
I got home, tried to open the jar--the vacuum seal was tight, resisted my efforts. I gave the top of the jar a whack to break the seal. I gave the jar's lid a twist--it opened easily now. Very easily. There was a strange sound. A tak of something solid hitting wood. A shifting in my hand. A giant sucking sound. A spattering. I looked down.
Sauce was pouring out of a thumbnail-sized hole on the bottom of the jar. It was landing on the floor, the table. I put the jar down. Sauce continued to ooze out of the hole. Looking back, I can see how I could have contained the flow, minimized the sauce leakage. At the time, I blinked drowsily at the spreading disaster, barely aware of what was going on.
A corner of the kitchen table was covered under a puddle of sauce, which dripped down to the floor. Sauce had spattered walls, appliances, chair legs. I was going to have to clean all this up. I was so tired. I sank into a chair. I realized I'd just sat in some sauce. I was too tired to deal with this. I was too hungry to deal with this.
I got up, sliced some bread, sat down again. I started dabbing bread into the sauce on the table, eating the results. Mmm. Tasty. I went kind of slow. I was pretty sure that the glass from the jar hadn't landed on the table--the tak sound seemed to have come from lower than that--but the sauce would have concealed glass, and the bread's crust was crunchy, so I wanted to be careful. Occasionally I laughed at what I was doing.
I didn't chew any glass. Somewhat invigorated by my repast, I had the strength to clean up the mess before I got out of my bespattered clothes and climbed into bed.