I maintain a pretty constant routine during my 9 to 5. Every evening around 7:30 PM, I have a shot of tequila so that the two Tylenol PMs are easier to swallow. I then lock myself in the bathroom and scrub hard, because for one unGodful 2-week period 10 years ago in Romania, I had to go without hot water. Once the heat was restored, I emerged in the only remaining clean clothes I had (which just happened to be the curtains, bound around my waist and loin, held together with a home-made glue that I won’t describe other than to say that, indeed, the HUMAN BODY MAKES ITS OWN ADHESIVE) and screamed, “As God as my witness, I’ll never go dirty again!”
However, I screamed this in English, and the local villagers could not, therefore, hold me to my oath, which was fortunate, because, a week later, we lost heat again. Learning my lesson from earlier, the next time I screamed, “As God as my witness, PLEEEEEASE, DO NOT LET ME GO WITHOUT HOT WATER AGAIN!” And that’s when I instituted the Sunday-Night Scrubbing. On Sunday nights, I give myself a furious bathing so that if I were to have to go without hot water, I would be so clean as to make it through the week without swearing.
My morning routine is much quieter. I wake up at 4:30 and press the button on the coffee machine, praying that somehow Alex remembered to fill it with coffee the night before, because an Irish Coffee without the actual coffee is pretty much just straight whiskey, and I’m smart enough to know that you shouldn’t drink straight whiskey before:
a. hitting the road and
b. going to work and
b. having breakfast and
c. before swimming. (or is that ‘you shouldn’t swim after a heavy meal?’ ooh, yeah, scratch ‘b’
The other thing I usually do is take a shower and apply some sort of gel to my hair. Of course, there’s no way my hair will be dry before I get to work because I’m smart enough to know you shouldn’t use open flames around your hair when you’ve just had straight whiskey, but not quite smart enough to figure out why our hairdryer emits an open flame. It’s old, so I think there may be things jammed inside, like pieces of waffle or plastic bath toys. You might forget that I have a kid. (*ed. note – the author, in fact, has two children)
Sooo, anyhoo. The final part of my routine is to run immediately to the bathroom upon arriving at the office to make sure the material I’ve applied to my hair has set properly. Normally, this is fine. But Mondays are a little different because of staff meeting. And since Sundays are the days Alex typically forgets to put coffee in the coffee pot, that means Mondays are the days where I usually have straight whiskey before work. Being of reasonable intelligence, I know well enough not to go directly to work after drinking whiskey, but instead to ‘give it a little time’ for the alcohol to wear off. I also know enough on these days that I should have another whiskey to pass the time and also to avoid shaving, because you shouldn’t be around an open blade after having had two morning whiskeys.
So on Mondays, I typically arrive an hour late, unshaven, and smelling vaguely less of alcohol than I WOULD, WERE I NOT SMART ENOUGH TO REALIZE I SHOULD WAIT AN HOUR BEFORE GOING TO WORK.
But it also meant last week that I was pulled directly into the meeting without having had time to check the progress of my hair lubricant in the mirror upon my arrival.
Two hours after said meeting, I realized with some horror WHY PEOPLE SHOULDN’T F*CK WITH A MAN’S ROUTINE! I was not able to recognize the unshaven, droopy-eyed man staring back at me last week. It did appear, however, that the man’s mouth was gaping open, much as my own was. Okay, so if you haven’t guessed, I was staring at ME. Perhaps I reached for the wrong adhesive, but in any case, it looked as though I had somehow been thrown from my horse headfirst into a vat of relaxer. A big spike stood in the middle of my head, towards the back. I turned to look at my profile and asked the guy at the urinal, ‘Hey, man! Did you throw a brick at my forehead when I was shaking it?
He didn’t answer while I checked my ears for bleeding, and wondered if I had been in some sort of automobile incident during the commute. And to think, that this whole series of butterfly waves could have been avoided if Alex would remember to add coffee to the coffee pot.
The End.
Oh by the way, somebody has to tell Vanessa Carlton that if she ever tries to cover U2 again I will start filling out a random magazine subscription card in her name every day until she apologizes to the Pope. It’s not that I don’t like her, I’d grope her in the back of my pick-up bed just like any other married man with kids would. But listening to her version of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ gave me this odd feeling of vertigo that I couldn’t quite place, as though I were trapped hopelessly, rising and falling within a small metal cubicle, otherwise known as an ELEVATOR!
In order to carry out this threat, however, someone from the Internest needs to send me her name and address.
Ooh, send me Sarah Harmer’s while you’re at it, Internest.
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