In my most private moments I stick my hands down my pants and get busted shoplifting by security guards
The days have become fast motion filmstrips that do not alter much. Sure, there are the subtle variations, someone at work I’ve never talked to before, a roadside cemetery I discover for the first time. But really, the days are just repetitious reels, self-destructively playing themselves out, Bill Murray Groundhog’s-style. I’ve suddenly begun to feel, sitting at the five minute red light outside the industrial park where I work, like the rest of my life has been deleted away, and the person doing the erasing has spared me this one moment to have the epiphany which I forget about as soon as I leave that window of time. What it features, essentially, is sitting at the red light and watching as the traffic proceeds by in its perpetual left hand turn, cascading by me as a steady stream of disgruntled faces. I follow each one long enough for the next one to be cued up, a continous stream of jabbering jaws, each one muttering things to themselves. Strangely, I notice every single person seems to be talking to themselves today, which is not very good PR for the early AM set, a demographic which I have found myself amongst.

I have cracked the shell of getting out of bed in the following way: by placing the alarm clock across the room as opposed to next to the bed. This way, when you’re in the midst of your early AM dream set, some exotic stranger cooing in your ear and feeding you tropical fruits, the insidious beeping of your alarm clock not only pulls you from paradise but also forces you to nearly break your neck as you run across the room to shut it down. There’s nothing quite like the jarring of context to pull you from your dreams. Which just may be something you learn early on. The next step, logically, is heading for the coffee pot (this is just plain and simple). A friend has recently brandished a coffee mug while on a visit to his house, and this is how he does it, in the following way of drinking a tankard of coffee, the mug a literal 3-cup affair. “I usually drink about two full ones of these,” he says holding up the cup, “and then I’m totally ready for the day.” Not only does this have the effect of totally clearing your synapses, it also features the added addendum of making the morning commute more comparable to an Indi500 race, swearing at motorists and passersby with the kind of vitriol that is just right and natural at 7:00 am. Arriving at the red light should probably contain the type of self-reflection which has me musing on how lucky I am to be alive. But instead, all I can do is curse the fact that the light is going to be red long enough to make me late. And then, as it turns to green, I find myself curing that too.

My coworkers are chiding me today with pretend-coughing after taking yesterday off. I don’t really make a good case for illness, telling them facetiously that I had an early tee-time. “Tomorrow is going to be even nicer,” they say to me laughingly. “Maybe you should have held out a few more days.” Actually, maybe I should have, I think, if only to make the movie more interesting. But it also occurs to me that Bill Murray only makes good by being good, and it seems like I have a long way to go. Which is, to be exact: 6 more days.