Our Morning So Far
It’s 11:30 am; Otis and I have only been up for one hour. With our combined hangovers and devotion to sleeping in, the two of us managed to snooze through the shattering barrage of noise made by the garbage truck emptying what sounded to be Dumpsters full of glass bottles and screaming children not less than two feet from our window. A few hours later, this early commotion was followed by a strange procession of horns on I-5 (conveniently located just one block behind the apartment) that whined in such perfect harmony I thought our upstairs neighbor was enthusiastically blasting Sigur Ros at quick, short intervals. Despite these disturbances, I was not to be truly roused until 10:30 when our apartment manager called to announce that the plumber would be arriving in thirty minutes, wanting to be sure that our closet had been cleaned out so they could get to the proper pipes.
Rolling out of bed, dressed head to toe in wool and wrapped in an acrylic sleeping bag, I sauntered into the cold, dark grey of the kitchen where Otis lay sleeping on his mattress in the corner, and told him to clean out the closet. Lifting his head from his blankety cave, he told me to call Frank back, tell him “no”, and go to bed. “It looks to be draining fine now, so I don’t see any real need for preventative plumbing,” I told Frank.
Now awake, I moved towards the freezing leather couch. Carefully laying down a blanket so as to not make contact of warm skin to cold leather, I smirked to think of how clever I was, duping the first law of thermodynamics so early in the morning. As I made myself comfortable, Otis pulled the most recent issue of the Stranger out from some hidden fold in his sheets, where he’d been cuddling it through the night. He was incensed by the issue’s poor writing, he told me, enumerating his grievances article by article, and finally producing a small moleskin notebook in which he had drunkenly written a letter to the editor addressing his manifold concerns the night before. As we bemoaned the unworthy exultation of shitty music and terrible art for the sake of odious ass-kissery, I puttered around the kitchen making peanut butter and honey sandwiches until what sounded like a plumbing truck pulled up outside our window. “Is that a plumbing truck? That sounds like a plumbing truck. Didn’t you talk to Frank?” Otis questioned at rapid pace, still swathed to his head in twisted sheets and old quilts. I peaked through the blinds at the truck immediately outside our window, so close in fact it blocked all natural light- “’Concrete sawing, drilling, and breaking,” I read, anticipating the intimate urban symphony in store for us as a city worker pulled a variety of massive machines out of his truck into the cavernous alley.
Ryan fearfully suggested they may find his tunnel*, which they very well may have had they sawed, drilled, and broke much longer. Luckily they were satisfied with drilling shallow entrenchments at various intervals- our tax dollars (were we not chiefly employed under the table) hard at work…
