Jeremy Bitz Can’t Get a Break

—The coffee cup said ‘Warning: The Beverage You Are About to Drink is Extremely Hot!’ Jeremy Bitz paid attention: he set his cup down on the table and let it cool. Ten minutes later, he enjoyed his coffee at a tepid temperature. ‘Just right,’ he thought, then choked.

—Jeremy never met a petting zoo he didn’t like, at least until the lyme disease.

—Being lactose-intolerant sometimes makes him lie down and weep.

—The only love letter Jeremy ever got that wasn’t self-penned came from Brenda Stahler. The i-dots were either daisies or suns. As he read it he got a pretty serious paper cut on his thumb, and a streak of blood blotted out the postscript. Now he can’t remember if it said Maybe someday or Maybe Monday.

—Certain popular comedies relate to Jeremy on a level he can’t explain; united by little else, they all feature nut-punching.

—In a surprising twist, Jeremy’s mother hangs herself with his umbilical cord. Though really not all that surprising if you knew her and her penchant for drama.

—The conditioner, she burns.

—In his diary, Jeremy changed what Emma said from ‘I can’t believe in a God that would create such a harelip’ to ‘He’s not conventionally handsome.’

—Someone keeps stealing the new issue of Entertainment Weekly from his mailbox and returning it a few days later, stiff with a viscous whitish secretion.

—On the first day of the month, Jeremy Bitz commits to seven resolutions to a more productive life, as recommended by his father. He has scars from four of them. It should be mentioned that Jeremy’s father constantly tells his other sons to call Jeremy with news of his death, and include him on conference call.

—Clifton Garner, of Akron, Ohio, has ‘never heard’ of Jeremy Bitz. He added, ‘by the sound of it, I don’t like him neither.’

—Convinced by a personal trainer at his gym, Jeremy Bitz spent $460 to attend a yoga retreat in New Paltz, New York, with eight people he had never met before. On the first day, between the group hike and the group lunch, a petite woman named Cynthia asked him if anyone had ever compared him to Ben Affleck. When Jeremy said, ‘No, not before today,’ Cynthia replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t think so.’

—An eyelash has been caught deep under his eye for so long that he’s just learned to live with it.

—Some men can predict the weather by the way their joints feel. In her break-up voicemail, Courtney confessed her teeth always hurt when Jeremy was on his way home from work. Jeremy’s teeth hurt all the time.

—He said mayo not tomato but the deli guy must’ve misheard him. The third time this week. But Jeremy ate the tomato anyway because suffering the allergic reaction was the only time he felt truly alive.

—Last year sounds infinitely better on reflection than The moors, they are inside me.

—Jeremy Bitz was looking through the obituaries and saw his own name. He made a few calls and found out where the funeral was being held. There was a massive turnout and everyone there—a wide range of ages and ethnicities—seemed devastated. Speeches were long and heartfelt. Jeremy Bitz glowered in the back row, desperately jealous.

—Jeremy just heard a joke: ‘Employee of the Month is a good example of when a person can be a winner and a loser at the same time.’ He got half of it.

—Four times Jeremy Bitz has felt profoundly happy since he was born:

1) The first time he heard his father was dead
2) Five minutes before Brenda Stahler didn’t show up for the Spring Fling
3) The period of time between having his ear being pierced with a golden hoop when he was 12, and that night when his brother David Jr. flaunted his new, slightly bloody ring
4) The last time he actually believed his father was dead: April 1996.

—Blow jobs apparently do not involve actual blowing, with or without a fan.

—Jeremy Bitz was mugged on his way home from driving school. The mugger handed back his wallet after finding just an expired library card and a picture of his father with the eyes cut out.

—There was the problem with the nervous vomiting.

—When Jeremy Bitz went to hell, he got stuck in with The Sullen instead of The Lustful.