A CHEERFUL NIHILIST
A RECOLLECTION OF EVENTS LOOSELY BASED ON REALITY
written by @silbersteindiego
THE WORST THING I EVER DID
I
The sound of an alarm coming from a car that was parked on the street abruptly woke me up for the third day in a row. “For Christ’s cock,” I complained. Then I laughed. “Did I just come up with that or did I hear it somewhere? So hard to create anything these days...oh well, whatever, let’s face this thing. What is it, Sunday? It’s ok, I can do Sunday.” Quick hangover check. “Yup, there you are old friend. Would you mind fucking off?” No answer. Don’t drink like an eighteen-year-old and sleep three hours, that was the answer.
It would have been spring if there was such thing as spring in my city. But there isn’t. Spring is just winter with flowers. I still prefer it over the winter winter, but to call it spring…I don’t know, I couldn’t be fooled by the word. But it did fool some girls into wearing skirts and that’s reason enough to call it whatever they wanted me to call it.
Stupid car alarm. Why do they keep putting them in cars? They don’t do anything besides bothering people that are trying to sleep. "I hope they stole his radio. I hope they stole the radio of the person who invented car alarms. They probably did and that’s why he invented them. Or she, who knows. Who cares, just shut that thing off or I’ll kill myself!"
I grabbed my phone to check what time it was. The cellphone shut off in my face as soon as I touched it, before I could see anything. Apparently, I had failed to plug the connector in the only angle that makes the charger charge the phone. “For Christ’s cock!”
I knew it wasn’t 3 PM because I had set up an alarm at that time. “3 PM, you disgusting pig,” I thought. I needed to know what time it was to understand if I should be tired or not. Not knowing is confusing. I removed the flattened carton box that I had been using as curtains for the last six months to evaluate the position of the Sun. I realized that I had no idea how to evaluate the position of the Sun. “What am I, a fucking astronomer?” I said out loud. I tend to talk to myself out loud a lot on Sunday mornings. Living alone will do that to you.
I had to pee. I had to eat. I probably needed to sleep but that was still unclear. All the lights were red in my control panel. My machinery was weak. I made one last attempt at avoiding my own material existence by curling back to bed and covering myself head to toes with the polar-bear-fur-imitating blanket. But existence is an unavoidable imposition. The blanket was just an inch short of what I needed. Classic. And the need to pee wasn’t going away. If anything, it was increasing. The parquet floor had absorbed the night’s coldness and the in-house flip flops weren’t on sight. “Barefoot mission it is. People have been through worse,” I thought. Whenever I have to face the cold, I think about those Uruguayan rugbiers who were stuck in La Cordillera de Los Andes for months and that makes it harder–albeit not impossible-to complain. When that’s not enough, I move on to the Holocaust. But usually the rugbiers will do. Much like the rugbiers marching through the Cordillera, I marched barefoot through the corridor that separated me from the bathroom. “No tiptoeing don’t be a pussy,” the captain of the team commanded. I entered the bathroom without turning on the light. The marble floor was twice as cold as the parquet. “Well, at least it’s not The Holocaust!” I tiptoed and stood on the brown floor towel, still wet from the past night’s shower, and twisted like Chubby Checker to move it towards the toilet. I did what one does in a toilet.
Next, food. I went through the door frame that used to hold the kitchen door and switched on the lights. I noticed at that very moment that the roaches were taking a couple of seconds longer than before to hide behind the oven and the microwave. I smashed two or three with my thumb while the rest sought refuge. “Sorry fellas, I have to establish dominance.” Mental note: Buy roach killer. I grabbed a napkin to pick up the fresh corpses when a very mild guilt found its way into my heart. Poor suckers, it wasn’t their fault that they were roaches. And what had they done anyways? Eating crumbs that shouldn’t have been there in the first place? I had a lot to think about. Morals are such a rabbit hole.
I went around the kitchen, did a lap or two but found nothing I wanted to eat. The absence of food gave me a good excuse to grab the skateboard and visit the Sunday fruit market. It’s always nice to have an excuse to do things. Purposeless activities seem so forced.
Grabbed the skateboard, grabbed all the coins left in the coin jar, grabbed the headphones, and off to the market it was.