Dangerspouse Rides Again

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Garage - Track




Nov. 17, 2003 - 5:14 a.m.

"(Tell me why) I don't like Mondays. I wanna shoot the whole day down...."

Yesterday it was Shakespeare and Dante, today it's the Boomtown Rats. I can only feign literacy for so long before my roots show.

To continue the theme of hating Mondays: I hate Mondays.

Yeah yeah, you hate Mondays too. Two days are just not enough to decompress from the blood pit that is your job. Come Monday, it's only by ferocious dint of inner fortitude (and the threat of unemployment) that keeps you from jabbing the Snooze button that 17th time.

Well I have it worse. In spades. Go grab a hankie and get that tiny violin tuned up.....

Monday through Friday I am Mole Man. I wake up in the dark, drive to work in the dark, and work though the dark. At 9am I am blinded by the Evil Yellow Eye as I drive home, there to disappear into my basement lair to escape it. At 5:30 I curl up in my nest of dirt and shed hair and repeat the process. I am the white Gollum.

But on Saturday I have to keep my proboscis to the grindstone til 3pm.

"Oh, boo hoo" you say. "Does Amnesty International not know about this travesty??"

Oh, shut up. The problem is, by 3 o'clock I'm usually starting to nod off. And I can't sound like I'm nodding off at my job. So every Saturday morning I stop at KFC, order the Family Bucket, then dump the chicken out on the highway. Next, pull into Dunkin' Donuts and fill the bucket halfway with Vanilla Hazelnut Coffee, black. At work, I top up the remaining half with Jolt Cola. By noon the bucket is empty, and my Depends are full. But at least I don't sound like Steven Wright on the air.

The downside is, I end up looking like Alex from A Clockwork Orange when he's strapped into the eye scaffolding so he can watch that film. Only I don't have the scaffolding. Once home, I jog around the state a few times til I pass out, usually at 1 am or so. Normally my wake-up time.

That means on Sundays I am cursed to rise at 11am or so (unless it's a race day).

Well, what's the problem with that?

The problem with THAT is...6 hours later I have to be back in bed! So there I am, finally a good night's coma under my belt, feeling great, just finishing brushing my tooth...and I have to take massive quantities of sleeping pills and gin to knock myself back down again. And I mean massive quantities. After 9 years of this routine my body is an anesthesiologist's nightmare. During surgery last year I counted backwards from 100, did all the state capitols, and made it halfway through reciting Monty Python's "Cheese Shop" sketch before falling into a fitfull doze from the gas. I would have survived Auschwitz because Zyklon-B just isn't strong enough.

Well, you can imagine what I look like on Monday mornings at 1am. I scare the cockroaches.

Shower? Maybe, if I can find the tub. Shave? Forget it. My dad told me never to put anything sharp near my neck when I'm drunk, hungover or tired. So I shave once a week. I do usually manage to dress though, albeit in some interesting combinations.

I can't blame the unusual garb completely on exhaustion, however. Ever since getting married I've had this thing called a "wife". And this "wife" likes to laze in bed til almost 6am. The shame! Ah, la dolce vita. Anyway, I try to be as quiet as possible so she won't spring awake and start talking. Always a danger.

I also don't turn any lights on. See, we have this willfully obstinate thermostat in our bedroom. Despite my best attempts at fixing it with a hammer and duct tape, for some reason it only knows two temperature setting: Off and Melt. Rather than take the easy way by going to DIY.net, or eveb calling an electrition, I've found an even easier route. I just ignore it. But that means that we have to keep the bedroom door open to let the main heater keep things at a biologically frendly level. If I turn the living room or kitchen light on, it wakes Wifey also. And as we know, Wifey(awake)=Wifey(talking).

So I dress in the dark (no, I'm too drunk to pick out my outfits the night before. Don't even start.), brush my teeth in the dark (once mistaking Gold Bond Medicated Foot Cream for Crest) and eat breakfast in the dark. You'd be suprised how well you can see by the light on those little digital clocks LED's. It's like being on a submarine during battle manuvers.

I've actually kinda gotten used to it, despite my whining about it here. In fact, I even take a certain ammount of pride when I open my Tupperware container at 7am and finally see what the lunch I made 6 hours before actually looks like. Usually it's pretty good, if not so artfully arranged.

An odd bit of trivia about me, only since it's pertinent: I'm not big on traditional breakfast foods. I like dinner served 'round the clock. When I lived in an apartment, the people who lived above me would come banging on my door at 1:30 because the smell of BBQ was wafting up into their bedroom and they couldn't sleep. Now that I have a house, I have free reign. (NewWifey(tm) can sleep through most nasal assaults. A quality every wife wishes she had, I bet). So I can sling the pans around making sauces, sautee's, etc., to my hearts content.

In absolute darkness.

But again, I've adapted pretty well. No 3rd degree burns, no oil spills killing the seals and penguins that live on my kitchen floor. Ok, maybe I don't get as elaborate as I'd like. Tough to do fine mincing under those conditions, let alone tell the Oregano spice jar from the Corn Starch. But god help me, I adapt.

However, last night...last night....

Monday morning drugged stupor was particularly bad last night. My Wallace & Grommit clock blared merrily at 1am and I pulled myself free of Morpheus' grip. Then teetered...tottered...teetered again, and...worst of all possible decisions: I decided to lay my head back down for just 5 more minutes. Really, I was hurting.

30 minutes later I cracked one lid and saw the clock. "Yeeeeeoww!! Oh no!!" That left me only 15 minutes to dress (the hell with the shower. Radio doesn't broadcast in "Smell-o-Vision"), make a nice breakfast and get the hell out of Dodge.

Yes, make breakfast.

I don't skip breakfast.

Ever.

So first things first: put a pot of water on to boil. Pasta is always good in a pinch. Grab blindly whatever clothes comes first to hand and sprint back to the kitchen, holding the clothes. My Spiderman briefs make a superb potholder, and it warms them up nicely at the same time. In go a half a pound of tortellini I'd par-boiled the night before, and 3 minutes later they were ready. Grab the pot with my undies, pour tortles into the colander, and slather Extra Virgin Olive Oil, salt and pepper over them. We're in the groove, baby!

I dressed while I ate, shovelling pasta straight from the colander with one hand while I hopped on one foot, putting a sock on the other with my free hand. I chucked the spoon while putting my shirt on and just funneled food into my mouth. Not exactly behavior that will endear you to your parole officer, but it worked. The remainder I tossed in a Glad bag and bolted out the door. The mighty WRX sped into the night, depositing me at Faceless Radio Corporation with 5 minutes to Showtime. Relief, blessed relief.

Now, I can't say that I'm overly proud of my nipples. I mean, I don't disparage them or anything. In fact, I rarely even think about them. It's one of those Guy Things, I guess. But it's not something I list in my profile as a defining quality: "Killer nipples". And I don't go around showing them off.

So imagine my suprise then when I got into the elevator which would whisk me up to my studio. It's a mirrored elevator. And what I saw mirrored back at me when I got in was my nipples. Both of them.

I'll cut to the chase, since my show is about over and I have to get home. So I can go to bed at 5:30.....

I ATE PASTA DRENCHED IN OLIVE OIL OUT OF A COLLANDER!

My Monday morning stupor coupled with panicky hyper-adrenaline lunacy led me to forget that colanders have holes in the bottom. Or sides!

To make matters worse, I'd grabbed a silk shirt from the pile. A really, really cheap one I'd found on a clearance rack at Kohl's a few years ago. I bought it just so I could say I owned a silk shirt, like Gatsby. This was the first time I'd ever worn it. Those of you who have wardrobes filled with these worm-threads no doubt already know this: when silk gets wet (cheap silk, anyway), it becomes transparent. And when it becomes wet with olive oil, it becomes transparent forever.

Fortunately my entire shirt was not drenched. I'd hate to look like I'd put on pants and a tie, and nothing in between. But I had two shoulder-to-belt streaks, about two inches wide, running right over each pink, erect, slightly too hairy nip. And there was nothing, nothing I could do. In my haste to leave the house I'd left my coat behind, and my compatriots are not the types to alleviate someone's embarassment by lending me one. And these studios are cold, like most radio studios. Can I tell you how many lactating jokes I've had to put up with since 3am? Not to mention the fact that I smell like I just crossed from the Old Country on a tramp steamer, Steerage class.

Well, at least I get to go home now. Gotta eat!

Buono appatito!

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