Two Days Sober

I think this compressed schedule is going to kill me.  Get into the office at 8am (after leaving home at 7am, get home by 7pm, catch a rat and/or one of the neighbor’s children for dinner, then pass out.

The supposed reward for working this retarded schedule is that I get every other Friday off.  But, when you lose 12 hours a day to working and commuting, you start to put off chores.  And when you have a second weekend job that’s also measured in 12 hour shifts, the world sort of takes on this evil grey-tone where all the other people become fuzzy, angry ghosts.  A Friday off does nothing.

Even though my weekend job involves sitting around watching porn and reading books for twenty bucks an hour, it still feels like some sort of insane psychological experiment.  So when the groundskeeper’s wife at my weekend job says, hey, it’s an easy gig, I grab her shoulders and shake her really hard.  If both jobs involved me fucking porn stars, I’d still be losing my mind.  85 hours a week, between the two jobs.  85 hours away from home, away from rest and relaxation, away from everything’s that’s beautiful.  85 hours a week of customer fucking service.  Being nice to hundreds upon hundreds of fucking insane, deceitful, dysfunctional, wealthy shitheads.

But, hey, I’m whining.  I could be on the street sucking cocks for pennies.  While that’s something I want to avoid, I did debate curling up under a tree on the way to work today.  I get off two stops early these days, walking three miles through the occasionally terrifying Northeast DC (though there’s nothing horrible happening at 7:30am), and I see the carefree homeless sleeping in the shrubs and dark corners, blissfully free of sanity, and I think, wouldn’t that be nice?  Just wear a potato sack and twitch and scream at people all day, then go get free lemonade at the CNN cafeteria.  Then I could trade all my bum money for a few minutes with a diseased hooker.  Maybe, if I’m feeling ambitious, I could brutally attack tourists at the Greyhound station.  I’ve memorized the common pre-assault and battery speech everyone eventually hears:

Hey…Hey!  Got a dime?  I gotta call my kid.  My kid’s sick!  I need a dime to make a phone call…

By the way, a great defense is if you’re also looking for something.  A dime?!  I need a goddamned quarter for my Metro card!  I can’t get back on the Metro without a quarter and my kid’s sick too!  What about my kid?!

For the more organized scam artists (the somewhat clean looking person claiming they’ve lost their license and they need cab fare to the hospital or something), it helps to respond incoherently.  Make up something ridiculous and say you lost it on the train.  Like, I left my tub of contact cement on the motherfucking Metro.  Do you fucking believe it?  Motherfucker!  (This is best followed by a blind rage where you start kicking at plants and pulling on tree limbs and screaming.)

Actually…reading the above, I realize that I behave like a lunatic wearing a potato sack anyway.  It’s what happens when you combine amusing city survival tactics with 85 hour work weeks.

The other thing I do, just like the potato-sack people, is to have a faux rage episode where I attack a tree and yell at a bum, and then see a pretty girl and suddenly compose myself, muttering under my breath as she walks by, “Hey, girl, you fine, mumble, mumble, mumble…” while sort of rocking back and forth with half-lidded eyes.

PS (Dear Internet):  I’ve decided to stop drinking for 30 days, unless the situation is unavoidable (like if the uncle kidnaps me at the Metro and drags me to the Quarry House).  I often decide to stop drinking, and it usually sticks for about 12 hours, but I had a bit of an episode Saturday.  It involved me throwing up for half an hour, then waking up in the closet covered in candle wax.  I have no clear memory of what happened, but I did download three gigs of Asian tranny midget porn.

I can cope with puking and waking up in the closet covered in weird stuff, but the tranny midget porn is crossing a line.  So the plan is to go dry from now till September 25th, when I’m going to New Orleans again.  There I get drunk, throw up, and then wake up in the closet with a shopping bag full of weird purchases from McKeowns.  It seems more constructive, but only because my friends have a lousy internet connection.