Otto says: Each morning, through the small crack in my bedroom window, I watch the sun as it makes its way up over the far away mountains way over yonder.
In my head again, there’s a pain.
A shooting sensation, akin to lightning, that rides like fire through each of my temples. The whole thing always hurts. Every morning. Always. Like some form of sad and institutional buggery. It’s incessant and nagging, forever present, and in those early moments of every day all I can think about is tough rope and a good hook.
But why? I ask.
Why me?
Surely it can’t be for lack of sleep. If so, then what might the doctors say? For me, in all honesty, I think that part of my life has been pretty fair as of late. I’m sleeping well I reckon. There’s enjoyment in it.
I do enjoy it I mean.
The places I do be drumming up with just my mind, and the things I do see, all of them clumped together, can make a real good home for the wild dreams of any man. It is here, sadly, and only here that I do see the good life I wish I had.
No pain.
No noise.
Nothing.
Do you hear that?
Hear what?
A place so good you could stay mired there forever.
From the highest point of this limbo, if you look close enough, you can see the expanse of a future. One with no worries in it at all. The whole place, I’ve figured over time, is nothing but a soothing cloak of immense darkness, where tiredness is both your haven and your vehicle.
And Lord knows I am tired of a lot of things.
Unrelentingly so.
Especially when I wake up, I am thrown back to earth like a bomb, only to be greeted by the sound of a ticking clock and the laughs of yet another fuck of a day.
Initially, I don’t want to move. So I lay there a while – Stewing. Cursing. Thinking. Wanking. Trying to sleep again but I know well, really, that it is useless. And as I watch the last strands of night thread themselves away into the abyss, I realise then that the only way out is – through.
Shit.
Like a warrior I know I must tackle this thing that awaits me – whatever it is. But like a legless whore, sometimes I simply can’t muster up enough of the beans to even get myself as far as the toilet.
How’s about that, eh?
Pretty grim.
That initial first piss. Always a mountain. The sheer thought of pushing it out the tip’a me flute does conjure up a brutal image of war in me, all the time, where I am the one, the only one, shooting Japs dead and digging ways through the trenches.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Don’t wet the bed whatever you do, I tell myself. I roar it if I can.
I won’t, I says.
Too old for that now, aren’t you?
Thirty-eight ya.
And not half enough sense.
The problem (if I can say it) sleeps in the bed with me at night, all night, and then, during the day, when I’m awake, it hangs off’a me like a giddy chimp or a bang average spouse.
What’s for dinner, honey?
Nothing again, second time this week – I counted.
And when can I expect the third?
Tomorrow.
Ssstunning.
With this affliction, I can only ever liken it to how I see it at the time – which is most days. Other days can be different – sure. For example, last Tuesday, all day long, I could have sworn I had the devil himself knocking about with me in the house. The fucker, he was non-stop poking me in the neck with pencils and calling me names like Fatty and Shitbox. But get this – I never saw him.
Not once.
The only sight I do get of him is when I look in the mirror myself and from now on, whenever I brush my teeth, or shave, because I’m so clever- I do avoid the bathroom altogether. With this, I’ve had to improvise. And what did I discover? Well, that the kitchen sink is as good as anything.
Really?
An almost perfect alternative.
Fascinating.
In there, you can rinse and spit and shave and cut yourself for as long as you want and the pleasure it often brings, when done right on a fine day, can be real special.
Again, just one of the many little tid bits you tend to discover while stuck in a house all day.
That precious time, spent waiting.
Wondering.
Where you’ll say it to yourself, again and again: Maybe it’s today.
Maybe it’s today!
Maybe it’s today?
Finally, at the toilet – when I’m stood over the bowl feeling that heavy stream of hot piss work its way down the length of my shaft, I almost become elated. Pushing and pushing, I’ll ask myself over and over how I managed to get this bloody far in my bare feet so early in the day – all things considered.
The real triumph is when the piss comes out and you shoot it like a professional pisser into the centre of the bowl. And when it comes out good, and when it’s clean, and when it has all the right sounds attached – you close your eyes and cap that thing as a win. You tell yourself that’s one little victory secured and in the waistband of my Dunnes Stores jocks. Wuhu. I wonder where the next one will come from?
Hardly an email, I say, or a ringing telephone.
Ha. Yeah right. Who do we think we are?
So I slink myself back in under the covers, the warm covers, and wait until I have to go again. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a shit this time.
Oh the joys.
Wait…was that the phone just now?
