Cast your minds. We’re setting the WayBack Machine to 1988. August. The last day of the month. At midnight.
Go watch Donnie Darko real quick if you really need to understand the precise instant in time. Also, understand that I actually had nothing to do with that film. It’s just dumb luck, in a lot of ways.
It’s midnight. Twelve at night, parameridian. In a minute, it’ll be tomorrow; for the moment, it’s no longer yesterday. We’re trapped in a diurnal singularity: a nocturnal state of quantum fuckery. Time has taken some time off.
These are the basic thoughts I’m having at the present nontime. Because I’ve been awake for exactly two seconds. I woke up in the dark, went to press the button on my watch to light the thing up, and shorted out its hourly doublebeep. So, here I am, not awake but not asleep, not yesterday and not tomorrow. It should be no particular wonder that it effectively turned out to be the first nonday of the rest of my life.
So, I’m kindasorta awake now. I’m not exactly happy about it, but whatcha gonna do. My bedroom’s the basement, its windows boarded up. And it’s got a monster in it.
Never do this. It’ll freak you out. I tilt my watch, still lit, toward the fishtank by the bed to ascertain the location of the monster. Bogeyfish: a Hypostomus plecostomus over a foot long.
It’s the only thing in the tank, of course. Because I hate fish. If you’re going to hate fish, then the only fish you possess should be this overgrown hideous freak of nature like Bogeyfish was.
Of course, seeing Bogeyfish by nothing more than the light of a Casio GShock curiously transforms the thing from a simple footlong ugly creature into a looming monster of anthropophagous pain. So, again: never do that; it’ll freak you out.
Anyway: I’m awake now. More importantly, Bogeyfish is in his tank. Which is good news, since the little fucker’s got this annoying habit of climbing out and waiting on the floor to see if I’ll step on him. It’s a monsterfish thing; you wouldn’t understand.
For my next amazing trick, I get out of bed and wander up the stairs for a while.
Before you go getting obscene mental images of any of that, I should do some of that detail shit real quick. I’m lacking shoes. I tend to sleep in my clothes; I always have. No idea why. Psychiatrists don’t care. It seems logical enough to me: get tired, and pass out; don’t bother to stop and change into something you’d only wear when you’re asleep; maybe take a bath and change clothes when you wake up, if it happens to seem important. The only danger is keys in your pocket on a really cheap waterbed; so, I avoid cheap waterbeds; problem solved.
Of course, that implies that I’m kinda insomniac. By some luck, that happens to be utterly true. I can’t sleep. Meaning that I can’t make some weird conscious decision to go off and stop being awake now. On average, I stay awake, doing whatever it is that I do, for about thirty-six hours in a row; then I go all blurry and find my way to the waterbed with the expensive mattress, get my shoes off, and pass out. Waking up is the same process in reverse, of course: I stop being tired, and therefore stop sleeping. I can never guess when I’ll be awake or asleep; I couldn’t tell you this minute whether I’ll be awake in twelve hours. If I’m still awake, then Yes; if not, then Maybe: because I may or may not pass out and then stop being asleep again by…two in the afternoon, it being now, uh…Thursday, 07 September 2006 2.35.16AM. Yay for timestamps.
Though it’s supposed to be midnight on or just before Wednesday 31st August 1988. Let’s get back to that for a while.
In fact, let’s call it 12.01AM, now that I’m upstairs and moving for the backdoor to get a cigarette. My parents don’t smoke and never did; naturally, all their kids smoke. It’s a rebellion thing. Hunter’s parents both smoke, so she doesn’t. You want people to quit smoking? Just tell them they should smoke. Reverse psychology, or something.
Incidentally, you just read that correctly. I’ve been smoking daily from before 31st August 1988 through 7th September 2006. And I’m not dead. But that’s okay: smoking stunts your growth, so I’m only six and a half feet tall.
People are morons. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that, at some point.
So here I am, out back, smoking and stunting my growth and not dying. Though, actually, I was about this height at the time. I’ve grown all of an inch or two since then. And it’s just after midnight on the last day of August. In DuhMoines. You read that correctly too: it’s no coincidence that Des Moines is pronounced that way. Someone was thinking ahead.
Actually, it’s not pronounced that way. It’s pronounced DuhMoine. But spelling it that way is irksome.
So I’m in the capital city of Iowuh. Just after midnight. That’s how that’s pronounced too: not Ioway, as people may have suggested. It could actually just be pronounced as Io, since it’s not unlike a jupiterian moon: half a billion kilometres from any real cities.
Why I’m in DuhMoines at all comes from my preslackerhood days, so we won’t discuss it.
See, because, this was the day it really began. I understand that now. I entered slackerhood on Wednesday 31st August 1988. And I stayed there. For eighteen years now. It’s comfy.
Gremlin’s Redundant Subsite, at gremlin.net, hints after that: [His] whereabouts prior to 1988 are shrouded in mystery, and a large percentage of the past ten years are difficult to ascertain as well. Granting that I initially wrote that in 1997, I guess I’ve known for a while when slackerhood began, and always kinda assumed that I’d eventually have to recount the story so far.
Not that I’ve fully begun to do that just yet. But we’re almost there now.
Slackerhood began at approximately the instant I decided to undecide to take some time off from college. That making no sense, rest assured that it might make more sense in a couple minutes.
Actually, it’ll make more sense in five hours. Because I’m having a cigarette, just after midnight, and otherwise killing some time.
I killed three hours watching Mtv. You could do that back then. There were videos.
Also, I ate a semicircle of Colby cheese dipped in Western Dressing. I’d recommend that, but you’d probably die of cholesterol poisoning and someone would sue me. So: never do that; it’s way too yummy for mortal men.
Time passed, as time is wont to do.