The Day Where Nothing Added Up

Man, today just really added up to nothing, and everything seemed annoying. This is very unusual; typically I love my days. I’m excited to wake up, I’m excited to go restore the old fixer-upper, I’m excited to come home exhausted and shower and cartoon in my lazy clothes with the drawstring pants, I’m excited to fall asleep so i can do it all over again.

But today all my little errands just seemed to steal my day in unproductive quarter-hours, which steadily compounded my irritability.

I went to Fred Meyer to look for a wine-chilling sleeve for my numb wrist and swollen hand, which have not enjoyed the last three months of nonstop vibrating power tools. But they had none — the housewares clerk said that sort of thing was “too fancy” for them.

I wanted to use the restroom at Fred Meyer, but a maniac had torn the door from its hinges, and two men were fixing it. Even the out-of-order-ness of the restroom was of a sort that seemed to say, “Chris, I’m obviously fucking with you. —The Universe.”

I set up some of my photo printers in my new basement studio at the fixer-upper, but didn’t want to face it if they still weren’t working right, so I went upstairs and te-attached a cabinet door. The tiniest thing I have accomplished in months, but my only accomplishment today.

I looked at my experiment with the self-leveling compound on the new kitchen floor: a disaster that would mean more power-tooling. I had no wine-chilling sleeve for my aching limb.

I looked down the aisle of ten thousand plumbing fittings at Lowe’s, bitterly thought, “You again, all you goddamn mother fuckers,” and realized I might be having some sub-acute illness or the like. It was time to call it.

So, I am in bed at 8pm doing one of my truly self-indulgent things: watching videos of wok cooking. Zig Zag the cat has come to sit on me.

I can feel it in my bones that tomorrow we will walk to Flour Market for rich coffees and Swedish almond pastries and everything will be beautiful again. But today was lost to some inscrutable internal recalibration upon whose root cause I could not put my (benumbed) finger. It was so unusual that sharing it with you felt like a nice idea. For some reason I thought you might find it intimate to read of my largely unrealized day. They’re out there, you know.