Deliriously Happy (20 page)

Dr. Goodbody's Total Goodbody System™ is such a revolutionary and completely natural way to eliminate all your health problems that it is quite common for people to feel frightened before using it and to feel disoriented and more frightened afterward. Before calling our customer-service line or 911, we suggest you sit down, drink eight glasses of water, and read our responses to the following testimonials, submitted by other satisfied customers just like yourself.

$750
FOR A 30-DAY SUPPLY? THAT'S $25 A PILL. ISN'T THAT A LOT OF MONEY?

—J. LOWELL, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA

Not when you consider that that comes to just about a dollar an hour—a dollar for an hour free of all your pains and complaints. Wouldn't you pay a dollar to feel like a million bucks? You'd have to be crazy not to.

And it's not merely a “pill.” Each Dr. Goodbody's Total Goodbody System™ daily bolus contains the entire line of Dr. Goodbody Solutions™, including ColoRooter™, BloodFlush™, TumorStopper™, and several others that are no longer available in most states. That's why each pill weighs nearly three ounces, and why we recommend you take it with eight glasses of water and the supplied lubricant.

MY DOCTOR HAS STRONGLY WARNED ME AGAINST TRYING YOUR SYSTEM, AND TOLD ME NOT TO COME CRYING TO HIM WHEN MY INSIDES FALL OUT.

—C. MAZIN, BROOKLYN, NY

Of course your doctor would say that.

I HAVE BEEN TAKING MY DAILY BOLUS WITH EIGHT GLASSES OF WATER FOR THREE WEEKS NOW AND HAVE SEEN NONE OF THE RESULTS GRAPHICALLY DEPICTED ON YOUR WEBSITE. INSTEAD I HAVE GAINED SIXTY POUNDS AND HAVE BECOME SO BLOATED I NO LONGER HAVE FINGERPRINTS. WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?

—T. O'DONNELL, SHERMAN OAKS, CA

You need to increase the size of the glasses of water. But keep the total number of glasses to eight.

I SMELL BURNING HAIR.

—D. MEYER, MADISON, WI

That means it's working. Other evidence that Dr. Goodbody's Total Goodbody System™ is detoxicleansing™, immunoblasting™, and revita-loosing™ your insides includes: headaches, nausea, vomiting, vomiting from places other than your mouth, tiny voices, rapidly cycling hypo-and hypertension resulting in staggering about with protruding eyeballs, cacophonous bowel sounds, muscle and joint pain that feels like slow roasting, inability to urinate, inability to cease urinating, spicy urine, sudden double-jointedness, itching in an unreachable location, cottonmouth mouth, athlete's face, knee sap, extremely offensive odor that smells like strawberries to you, undead feeling, migrating love handles, reverse vertigo, cravings for bees and other sweet insects, Jolie lips, jazz hands, visible bubbles in blood, eye hair, abdominal rash that spells “let me out,” uncontrollable urge to contact attorneys, unexplained French tips, laughing buttocks, and a blinding but oddly comforting white light.

If the burning-hair smell continues for more than a day, and your hair is not actually burning (which happens in only a small number of cases), there is a very slight possibility that you are having a stroke. If so, please seek help immediately by going online and ordering Dr. Goodbody's BrainReboot™. Choose overnight shipping.

I THINK I JUST PASSED MY SPINE.

—J. TURMAN, BANGOR, ME

That was your old spine. Rest assured that Dr. Goodbody's all-natural nanobiotic healthnauts™ are busily constructing a new spine for you, with fresh disks and state-of-art wiring. We think you're going to like it a lot. Do not be alarmed if, at first, your new spine feels somewhat gelatinous. This is a great time to try out all those frustrating yoga positions!

NO ONE IS ANSWERING THE GUARANTEED MONEY-BACK HOTLINE.

—M. GILVARY, LANCASTER, CA

All our operators are busy taking testimonials from other satisfied customers like yourself. Or they may be in the bathroom. We recommend that you take eight glasses of water and stay on the line, for as long as you can.

Chocoret Thins

A smooth chocolate taste in a tapered feminine design for women thirty-five and up. Comes in dark, light, or Chocoret menthol. Also available as an ice cream.

Liberty

For white men with some high school and a recent interest in political activism, Liberty exceeds all federal standards for tar and nicotine, and has been shown to cause cancer even in dead mice. “It's my right to smoke. It's my pleasure to smoke Liberty.”

Midnight

An affordable cigarette targeted at runaways living in big cities. “For young punks who don't care what they put in their mouths.”

iPuf

A social-networking app for pre-legal smokers, allowing them to virtually bum cybercigs from their friends and accumulate sophistication creds that can be redeemed for real smokes at age sixteen or if the clerk is cool.

Hound

The first cigarette designed specifically for canines. “All that bad doggy taste without that bad doggy breath.”

You might want to sit down. I wouldn't sit like that. You're going develop a real nice case of lumbosacral strain, and it's going to hurt for the rest of your life. You'll end up going to a chiropractor twice a week for the next sixteen years, and every time you go he's going to ask you if you've been doing your exercises and you're going to admit that you lost the sheet, and he's going to give you another sheet and charge you a hundred bucks. Meanwhile, the pain will be getting worse and you won't feel like having sex anymore and your husband is going to start looking around, and who could blame him, you've gone from being a reasonably attractive wife to a whiny sack of no sex.

Your husband? I'll get to him.

So he's out there, banging some prostitute (not wanting to start a relationship, out of respect for you), completely unaware he's being filmed for an HBO documentary. Of course, he catches this new hepatitis G, which makes hepatitis C look like hepatitis A, and which also makes your kidneys explode, possibly harming innocent bystanders. You, in turn, are going to take up with your chiropractor, the only man still willing to touch you, and that's going to get expensive.

So if I were you, I'd sit up straight.

Anyway, your husband has what we call a “medical condition.” Without getting too technical, I should warn you this next part is going to make me look smart and you feel stupid, and it's also pretty gory.

Your husband was admitted with extreme pain in the abdomen, which is obviously not our fault. Now, pain in the abdomen can be caused by any number of things, from comical food poisoning, which strikes in the middle of a fancy dinner party, to fatal—or
non
comical—food poisoning, to a three-hundred-pound tumor composed of hair and teeth, possibly the overgrown unborn twin his mother mourned instead of ever loving him.

We didn't want to rule anything out, so we opened him up.

There were no multi-hundred-pound tumors; that's the good news.

However, it's a real mess in there. There's a lot of intestinal tubing squishing around—what you call “guts”—as well as an assortment of small, esoteric organs they don't spend a lot of time on in medical school. And bear in mind that everything's pretty much the same color, not like in the textbooks.

After securing the kidneys as a precaution, I took a step back and opened the floor to suggestions. This is a teaching hospital, so there's always a bunch of smartass interns wandering around thinking they know everything. The “diagnoses” put forth—crazy, scary stuff—were summarily dismissed, because God forbid one of these snot-nosed wanna-docs is right.

I did a little preliminary exploratory surgery, employing what is known as the “scream test,” which involves poking various organs and seeing if the patient screams. That usually indicates a problem. The procedure is trickier when the patient is sedated, of course, but I've been known to get a decent scream out of patients who were technically dead. So I did some poking and prodding, but then I remembered I had an eye appointment, so I decided to close him up. And that's when … well, you might want to stand up and sit back down again. I don't know why; I find it helps, and I'm the doctor.

First, the good news. Your husband's portfolio looks great; I can't believe he got into Apple at twelve—pre-split twelve. I'd say the prognosis for your long-term financial health is excellent. However, last month your husband dumped seventy-eight thousand dollars worth of Clo-Pet, the pet-cloning outfit, two days before it was revealed that Dr. Kalabi was not in fact cloning clients' beloved companions but instead creating look-alikes, using plastic surgery and transplanting pieces from other pets. Yesterday, the SEC and IRS swooped in and froze all your husband's accounts—which may explain his abdominal pain—and then, talk about bad luck, this morning the CEO of your health-insurance carrier fled to Argentina with a transgendered dominatrix, owing me literally millions of dollars.

So, unless you've got fourteen thousand dollars in cash or a certified check, I'm going to have to leave Douglas wide open on the table. And it's very cold in there.

Excuse me? He's not your husband? Then whose—

Goddamn it. I'm going to have to go through that whole thing again. Great. Okay, well, then, who
is
your husband?

Oh.

I'm afraid I have some very bad news.

Eating breakfast now. Yum!

(thelarrydoyle via Tweetdeck)

Man, bacon is delicious!

(thelarrydoyle via Tweetdeck)

I could eat bacon all d

(thelarrydoyle via Tweetdeck)