Have you seen my monkey?

Life has been a bit … hectic lately. Hectic in a way that has me concentrating at full speed, nonstop, for almost every moment I sit in my office chair—which gets me realizing that this really, really is not advisable or normal, unless, perhaps, you're an air-traffic controller, in which case, please, concentrate really hard, nonstop, every single freaking moment you're in your chair. Thank you.

This hectic feeling has kept me from sleeping at night. I know the recommended remedies for insomnia—hot bath, warm milk, counting of sheep, hot sex (man, I never thought I'd write the words "sheep" and "sex" that close together)—but none of that seems to work, either.

Another remedy: Write! Get it all out. Purge the brain, then go to bed. Or, if you're not sleepy, get up and write something productive for once. Problem with the latter is that even though my brain is going a mile a minute, it's a fatigued brain going a mile a minute, which means that the minimum brain power for articulating coherent thoughts at 2 a.m. has not been reached. Thus, were I to get up and write, it wouldn't be productive at all. It would be incomprehensible, to you and me and the monkey I left in a Boston cab today.

Yes, another product of all this rapid-fire daytime thinking is that I seem to be getting more forgetful.

During the day, I am absolutely on top of it. I am paid to be on top of it, to keep track of every little detail, to keep the trains running, if you will.

But apparently, my brain has decided that when I'm not on the clock, little details like remembering not to leave the monkey in the cab sort of fall by the wayside.

I am sorry to announce: Gulliver the Travel Monkey, whom we all know and love, has gone missing.

Although I hate to think of him actually "missing"—a word that, in the case of a friend, takes on an ominous, dangerous connotation. "Missing" means he could have fallen into the wrong hands. Or it means he could have been found, then thrown into the nearest dumpster.

No, I like to think that Gulliver simply decided that he needed to be free.

I didn't forget him in the back of the cab. He hid. I took him out of my bag, and in that moment, he looked out the window at the Boston skyline and thought, "Damn, lady, all this intermittent travel may be okay with you, but it just doesn't cut it for me. I need to see the world!" And with that, he snuck under the seat upon which I'd placed him, and hid there in the darkness until he knew I was gone.

I picture his little head emerging from beneath the seat. I see him climbing up onto the handrail of one of the passenger doors and, on tiptoes, peering out at the city with those ginormous white eyes. The cab comes to a stop, the driver opens his door, and that is when Gulliver makes his move: He slithers out the door, makes a dash for the path that runs along the Charles River, and poof! He's gone.

At this hour, I imagine that he's already caught a boat to Nantucket, and that he's enjoying a nice big bucket of steamer clams—his first of many to come.

It is times like this, when I have just concocted a story to make myself feel better about my missing monkey, that I am reminded I should never, ever, become a parent.