Friday: A To-Do List.
• Wake up at 7am. Kindly curse the birds that can’t stop speaking. Apologize and abruptly roll onto the floor as if to put out all ensuing metaphorical fires.
• Check the internet to note that it still exists. Read comments on various news sites. Thoughtfully stroke beard hair while wearing sad clown makeup.
• Brush teeth. Give a groggy, bedhead smile to the non-existent surveillance cameras.
BREAKFAST!!!
• Make two pots of coffee in quick succession. Burn oatmeal. Elatedly eat it with maple syrup anyway.
• Hide in the basement and pretend it’s a gateway to another world. Emerge periodically in clothes from different eras. Convince at least one imaginary person that time travel has transpired. If only to kiss Amelia Earhart.
• Practice drums. Only toms. Give up all unnecessary thinking.
• There should be no more than five perishable items in the refrigerator at one time. Or everything goes. (Two couples of produce and one scruffy loner of lowfat milk.)
• Finish the rock opera that’s been lingering around the notebooks for too long. “What Are We Going To Do With Randy?” A squirrel is born to human parents. They hide him in a cinderblock wall where he tirelessly practices a tiny, magical guitar. He becomes famous, leaves home and never looks back.
• With absolute conviction, wear a straw hat and adopt a cliched southern accent. (Do not respond to the name Matthew or any of its derivations. Ever.)
• More animal lamps.
LUNCH!!!
• Slice up four pickles, some red cabbage and a handful carrots. Use a fake Russian accent and grouse at the ghost-like guards.
• Keep saving up for that Cross Classic Century, 14 Karat Gold ballpoint pen. (Oh, baby!)
• Write a screenplay about people who talk about writing screenplays.
• Write a treatise about the sarcastic soul living in the mirror. (There is still time to repent! Or maybe just try being a decent human being.)
• Make a third pot of coffee. Incant the words “Hotsy Totsy!” when the water boils.
• Pet the Mets baseball cap on the coffee table. Two times on the outcroppings of the N, three times on the tail of the Y.
• Work on an unconditionally fictional song concerning living in a small city as a quiescent balladeer, slowly becoming a useless, childless commodity within a murmuring community.You know, fun stuff.
• Consider celibacy and sobriety. Fall down laughing. Bruise knee. Make sure no one’s looking.
• Go for a run on one of three increasingly familiar loops. Tree, tree, car, tree, car, tree, car. Repeat while reciting a list of complaints in time to the pavement patter. Muttering teasing wheezes until the ominous thoughts and clouds evaporate, until it’s only Daft Punk and air guitar.
DINNER!!!
• Make two perfect seven-minute eggs with blanched broccoli and Sriracha. Eat slowly while staring at the metal arrows from the Several Arrows Later Anniversary Tour. High-five forehead.
• Play guitar to Tom Petty songs. Sing like Petty, squint like Petty. Be Petty.
• Run fingers along the spines of books. Try to recall the contents. Argue with David Foster Wallace out loud. Sorely lose. Make sure no one’s looking.
• Eat eight pickles. Stare at empty pickle jar.
• Pace through the house. Pace through all the practical plans that got left off the list. Check the level of the fire extinguisher. Forget everything else.
• Pull my sweet Sleipnir out of the driveway like a creaky viking ship. A late-light captain sporting a Mets hat, in a bespeckled white van and some sick sonar presets on the green-lit radio. Slightly swerve the high seas of Broadway as the sun fades over the Hudson. Plunk down at Kingston Point. Watch another day cut and run.
• Go home. Do the dishes. Read Denis Johnson. Turn off the bedside horse lamp and listen to the fan, the cars peeling out deep into the night. The same restlessness and desire is everywhere.
• Fall asleep at the bottom of the bed with a dumb smile and just enough of a sense of belonging to do it all again.