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Date Posted: 16:09:41 04/03/02 Wed
Author: Jim
Author Host/IP: 11Cust181.tnt1.tacoma.wa.da.uu.net / 67.250.18.181
Subject: Eleven-Hour Day

Eleven-Hour Day
Copyright 2002 by James A. Danner

You work an eleven-hour day and you don’t even eat. Nothing to do but think, think, think. About all the wrong things, and all the wrong women. So you compensate by turning the stereo up, almost as loud as it’ll go. And your boss comes in around one, mostly to check up on you, and says, “I sure hope your hearing improves.” And you answer, “Not if I keep playing the radio so loud.” And he laughs and you laugh but that is the extent of your conversation. You don’t even take any breaks. When you’re tired of painting, you drop your brush in the bucket and wonder aimlessly around the empty house for five minutes, looking for something else to occupy your mind or hands.
You leave around six-thirty or seven and stop at the AM-PM to get some gas, and as you approach the entrance, a girl holds the door for you. She’s overweight but still attractive and she smiles shyly, self-consciously, and you return it but that’s about it. You’re too tired to talk.
You buy a beer and open it on the road. To hell with the rules. It warms you immediately, and you remark to no one about how goddamn great that first beer always is, especially when the beer’s ice cold and the smell of paintfumes has made you ill.
You get home, and there’s no one to greet you but your bird, and he does so endlessly until you tell him to shut up. But that doesn’t work either, so open his cage and he climbs out onto your arm, and eventually onto your shoulder.
It’s dark, the curtains are closed but you don’t open them. You strip down instead, slumping into an easy-chair, busting open another beer and turning on the television. For company instead of entertainment. The only thing you really watch is Friends, only the syndicated episodes, and your favorites are the ones where Chandler’s in love with Joey’s girlfriend because those hit too close to the truth, except you never eventually got the girl. But you still see her, and often, and you still ache, always from afar, except on those rare occasions when she’s ill and she needs someone tender, but that’s always as far as it goes, and it’s all right, it’s better that YOU ache and not -----.
But it’s best not to think about her. When Friends is over, you get up and turn on the stereo. You’re the only person in the world who still has a turntable, not because you’re some pretentious jerk, but because most of your favorite albums are not available on CD.
You crack another beer, and your belly’s warm, got a good buzz going, so you shut off everything and bust out your guitar and sing some old sad songs to your bird, who sometimes sings along with you. And later, maybe you will write, but probably not, because by now it’s after nine and you gotta get up early for work. You’ll go to bed instead, maybe read for a few minutes, maybe thirty, and as you lay there after the lights are off, you’ll think of that line about how most men live lives of quiet desperation and realize that if this is true you are only average….
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