A Man's Work

A hell of a day.

The agitation started early, or relatively so. The cable guy came knocking on the door at about 11:30am, damned irregular for a Sunday and highly inconvenient. I had only dozed off a little after 4:00am, both from waiting for my wife to return from Detroit on an 'emergency' road trip (a drag queen and a post-operative now-male transgender breaking up warranted an intervention our own marriage, as of yet, has not), and from my readjustment to regular life after a week of third shift. Cable was a need for the live-in leech, something I'd honestly rather do without. The only change we need to make to the Springsteen song "57 Channels and Nothing On" is the number of channels, although I am grateful for again having Food Network and being able to watch PBS past midnight. The early disturbance already had the wife riled, and it didn't help that I had to put the excited dogs in the bedroom with her while the cable guy performed the installation.

So, with only a fitful seven and a half hours of sleep, I got up and dressed, continuing with the laundry I had been doing up until about 4:00am the night before. In less than an hour, the developmentally-arrested welfare brat from the apartments across the street had to come and check out the cable, even though I and every other able-bodied worker have already been providing him with top-notch high-definition cable funded by our involuntary payroll-deducted contributions to state and federal welfare programs. His mother thinks his toddler-level clinging and behavior is cute, and perhaps that fallacy helps her deal with the remorse resulting from the child's father choosing a high-paying sales career in Alaska over prolonged unwed white-trashery with her. My own son's friendship with this whelp troubles me to no end, and I still can't resolve if it serves to cloud his choices in the company he keeps, so much below his own age and abilities, or if it's a result of those poor choices. The brat's mother, of course, thinks me simply a harsh and overbearing father, that I and all the school officials that continually deride her for bringing up an intentionally mentally degenerated child must not know what we're thinking, that even my own daughter must be mistaken when she describes the imbecilic antics he practices in the classes they share. He skulked through our first floor like a frightened china rodent, only emitting sounds approaching confidence to make ridiculous and annoying shrieks and sound effects on top of the Xbox din coming from the dining room; my oldest son's greed and misbehavior cost all of us a degree of privacy, but he simply can't be trusted to share or remain civil in his own room.

I took a long walk to the closest convenience store branch of my employer to buy fresh light bulbs, still remarking humorously to myself that I should stagger their installation so that I'm not always replacing every bulb in the house at the same time. I used the walk to try and break in a pair of work shoes I had bought too hurriedly several months ago and still hadn't worn through a full shift; even on the walk, the four smaller toes of my right foot and my left ankle started to feel sore then numb up. By the time I got back, some forty minutes round trip, and that was while taking my time, entropy was in full swing; the Xbox blared as my three children and the imported brat challenged each other for who could say nothing the loudest, the live-in was working on the homework for her online class that was due three days ago, and my wife was wandering through the house texting and talking to various members of her flock of freaky faeries trying to patch up her star-crossed pair of social fringe misfits. Since it was now 4:00pm, I thought it was high time I had breakfast.

The food didn't do much for me. I returned to my housework, literally hiding in the basement, sitting on a chair that I had just reglued and clamped for the seventh time in a year. I wept, from sheer stress and the apparent display of my wife's priorities. She'd been making birthday celebration preparations for her side show for several days, making the absolute zero degree of time she spent even thinking about my own stand out like a broken and humming neon light. Her haste and concern in responding to their broken relationship highlighted the back-burner level of disregard with which she treated our own. All I'd wanted from her all weekend was just a few minutes of time to focus on us, and that was too much to ask. I still plan on calling marriage therapists in the morning, but I'm keeping my little directory of divorce lawyers close at hand. Before she left for her customary Sunday night bacchanal of alternative lifestyles, I reminded her that she might actually have to commit to making the therapy sessions instead of dropping everything for her estrogen-starved starlets.

I've got a little less than an hour before she returns home. Just enough time for another beer and a cherry-cavendish pipe. Time to light up and mellow out, the rant exhausted now. Still a hell of a day.