The Numeral 8 Being Lazy and Laying Down is the Symbol for Infinity, Right?

Home Improvifying.

When you are married for eight years, you talk about a lot of shit. Especially if you move across the continent twice, live in abject poverty, and decide that one of you is some kind of artiste who needs a bunch of me time to read books and scribble unsubstantial whinings about his horrible existence as a well fed flaneur. Also children. 

There is much dialogue, about almost every subject. You'd think it'd involve all kinds of serious philosophical, religious, personal, passionate give and take about all the things you fear and hope for and wish to accomplish in this once round theater that is your life. You would be wrong.

Lately, I've had some kind of mysterious rash that has founded a colony and written a treatise on Manifest Destiny and set about pacifying the great expanse of my skin. I don't know from whence this plague has come, but I've narrowed it down to: poison ivy, grass allergies, some weird reaction to herbicides, eczema, too much fabric softener, or West Nile virus. It's itchy. I wake up clawing at my arm. I slather the affected area in isopropyl alcohol for relief. I contemplate heating irons in the blue gas light of our stove so that I might cauterize the nerve endings of my skin and thereby annul the itching. It sucks.

The Rash has assumed primacy in our discussions. "When are you going to get rid of that shit?" "I think it's getting better." "You should go to the doctor." "It's probably from the new detergent." "Holy shit, this is getting bad." "Stop scratching already." "Maybe it's not so bad." "I might need to go to the doctor about this." "How are we going to fuck with you all rashy?"

For two weeks.

The point is, you live with someone and you become them and all the things that you could discuss or ponder or argue about become this thing that consumes everything and it all happens before you know it, as it's happening, and the only thing that matters is that you're there in the moment with the dialogue and all the other shit recedes and you end up standing in your kitchen making dinner and talking about each others' work for the day and you realize, as you stir the ground beef for that night's tacos and look across the steam at your spouse, that you're right where you need to be.

I love the fuck out of that woman.