Chapter 2, sort of

Dennis could not find the right words to say to Sarah Winfield. She was his first new account after he began delivering for English Springs Bottled Water. They had gone to high school together, and she recognized him when he was filling up his delivery truck next to her at the gas station.

She could not help breaking Dennis' heart. He had been in love with her for as long as he had known her. She sat next to him in geometry class when they were in the eleventh grade, but aside from giving her copies of his notes or explaining a theorem for her again, he did not say more than three or four things her that entire year. She ran on the cross-country team then, and she would come to class in a gray sweatshirt, old blue running shoes and a pair of thin nylon running shorts. Every day for a year, Dennis carefully looked over the corner of his textbook and desk and rested his eyes on the warm tan skin of Sarah's thigh. She still runs every morning, but these days she wears a pair of tight black Lycra running pants and a fleece jacket to keep out the morning cold. She waves to Dennis as he drives past her running trail on his way to make the day's deliveries, and every time she does, he is reminded that the closest he will ever be to her was 14 years ago, explaining the difference between sine and cosine.

One night he saw her at a concert at the smoke-dimmed coffee shop he goes to every night after work. She stood near the doorway at the back of the room while a dread-locked girl on a stool at the front of the room sang a rough-edged song about a man who had raped her when she was ten. Dennis would not have spoken to her, but she spotted him on the other edge of the room and smiled, flipping her hand back at the wrist in polite recognition.

[unfinished for now, laptop battery is about to die]

Chapter 1

The electronic bleat of the alarm clock was dull and distant through the fog of Dennis' sleep. It sounded buried underwater, like he was hearing it through foam earplugs. He rolled his head to the side and looked at the clock radio on the bedside bookcase beside him. 5:00 a.m. The thin green arms of the digital numerals flickered lightly, burning their bright message onto his retinas. 5:00 a.m. Christ, that's early. He managed one arm free from beneath the blankets and groped his fingers to a corner of the tiny black plastic cube. He fiddled across the top of it, trying to remember which of the buttons turned it off completely, and which one was the snooze. He found the long, grooved snooze button and tapped it. Actually, it was not so much a tap as it was the full weight of his arm transferred to his hand and heaved down upon the snooze. There is nothing quite as sweet as falling back asleep without fear that you will not wake back up in time for work.

There was no pause in the alarm. It bleated like a lost puppy with a digital larynx. And then it stopped. Dennis fell back asleep. For thirty seconds he slept. Then he realized there should not be a delay between hitting the snooze and the end of the alarm. The snooze button made the alarm stop. Why did it continue for a few seconds more?

And then he remembered Wesley. Wesley was the occupant of the next apartment. This building was actually an old high school whose classrooms had been reworked into a series of small apartments. The expense of rehabilitating the entire building to the most current fire codes would have been cost-prohibitive. It was much cheaper to slip the city building inspector $500 and skip the hassle of firewalls between the units. Consequently, the two-by-four and sheetrock wall between their bedrooms was little more than a heavy curtain between Dennis and Wesley.

Wesley and Dennis also shared a water heater. Everyday began with a quiet battle to find out who would use the hot water first, and on Duluth mornings in February, this was a very important battle.

Wesley's alarm bleated out again. It stopped quickly, and Dennis' chirped to life on a local news talk station. Dennis ripped back the covers and sprinted across the two rooms of his apartment and into the kitchen, which also contained the shower. He reached into the stall and turned the handle all the way to left, praying that Wesley was still in bed. He knew better, though, and imagined this same scene mirrored in his neighbor's apartment, Wesley's equally pale and thin body standing naked before the shower stall, one hand extended into the chilly downpour of water, trying to decide if the warmth he felt in the water was real or phantom.

Dennis left the water running at full blast and went back to his room. He pulled the top drawer of his dresser open to reveal rows of white t-shirts, white printed boxer shorts and an assortment of brown, black, gray and brown socks. He yanked one of each out onto his bed and pulled his tan trousers off the back of the chair where he had draped them the night before.

He ran back into the kitchen, pulled back the thick plastic of the shower curtain and stepped into a light embrace of steam. He smiled and ducked his head under the warm stream.

Already behind

Damn, I didn't get a single thing written yesterday, and there's no way I can make up for it today. Best hope: assimilate all of my academic writing and emails from the last two months into some kind of postmodern, genre-bending, bullshit novel. Or not.

I'll play along now.

p.s.
Everything here is a draft, okay? I overwrite. Also, I sometimes underwrite. Every now and then, I just won't write.

Glad we got that out of the way.

the beginning

I'm not exactly sure if there will be a good way to read this thing since it has that nice most-recent-entry-first format of a blog. Also, I have serious doubts about whether it will be worth reading. But that isn't really the point, is it? This is all about having so little to do everyday that you post 1,500+ words to a freakin' website everyday; likely one that only you read.

This is how you know your life has not worked out as well as you planned, I think.

Wish me luck.