Big day here yesterday.
     I went out to dinner.
     Again.
     And I didn't even have a panic attack despite the fact that just the day before, I found a fingernail in my chocolate shake.
     My wife thinks it was really just a piece of plastic packaging that resembled a fingernail, but I think this bizarre opinion of hers was merely the first symptom of the food poisoning she suffered all Saturday night.

     What really worries me when I go out to dinner isn't the food (bad as it often is).
     What really worries me is being in a large room with strangers given knives and forks without background checks.
     When some of these strangers turn out to be local celebrities, the urge to flee can become overwhelming no matter how fingernail-free the shake in front of me may appear....

     I live in a small town of 45,000 people.
     You'd think that that would be enough people to provide a good size buffer between me and our 50 or so local celebrities, but it isn't. 
     Nearly every time we eat out, some local celebrity is seated at the next table, booth,  or stall.
     In this way does the line separating my life from that of Homer Simpson increasingly melt away.
     I mean, you know how it is there in Springfield.  Not an episode goes by without Homer bumping into one of the local celebrities. 
     The Mayor. 
     The Chief of Police. 
     Members of the News Media.
     There are times when his life and mine seem to entirely merge. 
     But I don't want to work at a nuclear power plant!  I don't!  I don't! I DON'T!!  The closest nuclear plant is 83 miles away!  It's on the shores of Lake Erie!  I don't want to commute 83 miles every day!  AND I DON'T KNOW HOW TO SWIM!!!

     Sorry.  I just get spooked sometimes by the weirdness of it all.
     I mean, we have a former three-term mayor of our town now working as a greeter at a Wal-Mart type store we frequent.
     And the last time I ate at our favorite Mexican restaurant, our local TV station's anchorman was seated right next to me.  Sure, he was wearing an old white T-shirt instead of a suit in order to either disguise himself or to accent his impressive yet heretofore unsuspected potbelly, but I recognized him all the same.  And the whole time I was eating, the only thing I could thing of was, What if he interrupts my meal with a special bulletin about what's really going on back there in the kitchen?  What if he's here on undercover assignment after receiving a tip that the Mexican Mafia is planning a hit on that one waitress who's refusing to wear a skirt shorter than her knees? 
     To this day, I just don't know how I managed to choke down my chicken burrito and get the hell out of there alive.

     Had that been an isolated event, the recurring nightmares might have stopped by now.
     But it wasn't.
     Last time we went to Bob Evan's Restaurant, one of the most famous local car dealers sat nearby.  He's on my TV every day, promising deals that will knock my socks off.  To emphasize the point - or maybe to explain it to the type of people most likely to buy a car on the basis of a TV ad - he always appears barefoot in these ads.  As he promises to knock my socks off, he lifts one of his bare feet, as if to say "Come on in and THIS type of naked appendage can be yours, too!"
     This worries me to no end.  It's illegal to drive barefoot in Ohio.  How the hell do his customers ever get off his lot??
     Visions of a customer-clogged expanse of asphalt haunt my nights. 
     My days are spent living in dread of my township raising my taxes to buy all the jaws-of-life the situation so desperately requires....
     And then suddenly there I was, trying to pick the non-brown pieces of a salad out of my bowl and put them in my mouth without accidentally dropping them in my water glass when I looked up and saw The Man Himself.
     I almost spritzed my cherry tomatoes.
     And then I couldn't take another bite - I was simply too busy wondering if they were letting him eat there barefoot or if his entire professional persona was one big lie.
     As my wife settled accounts with our waitress, I shielded my eyes and ran off into the night, utterly unable as I was to handle either alternative just then....

     Another time, we ended up seated next to the most famous of our local DJs.  A man who could make the billionth playing of Rod Stewart's "Maggie May"  sound as exciting as the crash of the Hindenburg.  A man whose ads for a local appliance store made listeners want to run right out and make love to a hot little all-metal stove on special this Thursday only.
     This DJ who had been verbally charming an entire tri-county area for over 15 years suddenly couldn't convince his own father that they'd never lived in San Francisco.
     "Dad, we never lived anywhere in California!"
     "Not that San Francisco, you dumbass!  I'm talkin' San Francisco, Indiana.  You know, the one with that big orange bridge your mother jumped off of when she heard you'd dropped out of dental school to become just another bum on the radio."
     "Dad, mom didn't jump off any bridge.  She's right here having dinner with us!"
     "How dare you besmirch the name of your mother!  How dare you think she'd ever be caught dead in a dump like this!"
     "Mom - please tell Dad how wrong he is."
     "After you ate the last roll?  Tell him yourself, Mr. Can Talk All Day On The Radio But Can't Remember To Save Two Words For His Family Once A Week Even With All Those Ten Cents A Minute Plans They Have Now.  How like you to only remember I'm alive when it serves your own purposes."
     It took two waitresses and a bus boy to keep me from installing a tuner dial on the adjoining table just so I could change it.

     As traumatic as constantly having to eat with local celebrities is, as ego-crushing as it may be to watch them act as if they don't know me in public despite having come into my home almost every day and night for the last umpteen years, dining out in the celebrity-free section of our restaurants is even worse for me anymore.
     This is because I recently read an article about how hospital patients can recall what their surgeons say even when in the deepest of anesthesia-induced sleeps.
     If their surgeons happen to say anything rude or nasty about the size of their breasts or the crookedness of their noses, for instance, it can have a very negative impact on their recovery time, not to mention their will to live.
     This made me think of all the background conversations I'm subjected to in public restaurants. 
     Last night, for instance, I could hear a woman two booths back discussing in explicit detail her encounter on the road with a drunk driver.
     I could also hear a man at the table next to ours telling about a recent attempted suicide at our local state prison for the criminally insane.
     "So I asked him, 'What's new?' and he said 'I tried to kill myself last night.  I'm still here.  What did I do wrong?'  Turns out he'd tied his bedsheet to his neck and to the bed and jumped from the bed to the floor and nothing happened.  He'd just ended up standing there, with a limp sheet between his neck and the bed.  He finally untied it from the bed when he needed to go to the bathroom, and then the rest of the night he'd gone walking around the ward with this sheet tied to his neck until someone noticed and put it back where it belonged."
     That's the sort of recovery-delaying thing I heard while fully awake.
     I shudder to think about all the bits and pieces of conversation that seeped into my ears after I'd downed my wine.
     And what about all those subliminal tales of woe stored up in my head after almost 40 years of dining out?
     Just thinking about all of the second-hand talk that has drifted through my brain without my knowledge since the day I was born is making me twitch.
     Even a brief examination of a few recent notes taken from my head this very morning reveals countless little lumps of pre-cancerous fear.
     Coincidence?

     I suddenly don't have the will to continue this entry.