The morning was passing quietly. There was the soft click and brief run of the air conditioner as it sampled the air temperature. The background warble of the same news on the TV with different names and places than yesterday. The cat stretching and rolling on the floor in the next room, vying for his attention against the doldrums of his mind. Coffee cooling in a Cafe Du Monde cup from a trip to New Orleans years ago, its aroma drifting across the room enticing his wife as she could smell it, while he had lost that gift some time ago. It promised to be a warm, humid and rainy day, but the afternoon expected to cheer with sun and light winds driving out the solitude the darker skies and darker mood provided.
He turned the page, realizing he hadn't taken in any of the passages he had just read, so turned the page back, and with a moments mild chagrin put his hand over the page and then closed the book. He was thinking of nothing, everything, and that thing. Yesterday had been a trying day, and that turmoil had stuck to him like axle grease. It had been a perfect storm of a young woman's psychological soup, her entitlement, arrogance, and stupidity threatening to be mistaken for malice, his rapidly diminishing pool of patience persevering to the door but not beyond, and a no-response-from-management to address the minor quake and its serious aftershocks. The taint stayed with him all day, confining his usual ardor for his work. He had been trying to dilute the thoughts and emotions tied to it ever since, but it remained the Sun, his other concious thoughts orbiting about it. Like a yo-yo, he threw it afar only to have it roll back on the string that kept it tied to him, snapping at him. The rest of the day was just irksome. He found himself staring pensively at the cat, who was struggling between curiosity, grooming, and napping. He gazed out the window, thinking it fortuitous that he had the next week off. He was no good to anyone or himself in his current mood.
With the encounter yesterday, its spin-offs and friends, he had come home emotionally and physically exhausted. At the end of the shift a barely more than teenaged clerk, who earlier felt she had the right to address him an a tone usually reserved for idiots, read a compnay broadcast email drenched in the velvet tones of corporatese announcing that one of his physician colleagues, a man he respected, liked and considered a friend, was quitting. At least this email didn't have the hint of hostility the others had. His leaving was another in an unleveraged tidal wave of talent and skill leaving the company, taking with it the quality of care and high standards the company promised. They bore the news in silence, the vexed clerk feeling ignored walking awkwardly away. He texted his friend and thanked him for the news that "took my day to a whole new level of suckage".
He had driven home in silence, the radio off, finding a moment of quiet sans the constant Pandora stream that masked the tension of the overly busy clinic, the first time in 13 hrs he was truly empty and carefree. He made his way to the refrigerator having once again not been able to get time for dinner hours past, his wife pointing out that they needed to clean the long haired cat's ass as he manged to sit in his crap again. That done they watched a favorite TV drama off the DVR, and called it a night. He missed most of this moving through it all in rote passivity, finding himself in bed staring at a news story on his tablet, barely registering his wife, dealing with her recent spell of insomnia by complaining the light from his tablet was keeping her awake. Turning it off, plugging it in, he was asleep in minutes. Waking once in the middle of the night to pee, with his cat's ungrateful still wet butt in his face, another time hearing his night owl son quietly but not, clattering down the hall to his bedroom at some O-dark-thirty hour before day break, he had otherwise slept the sleep of the dead. He woke knowing he had dreamed, snippets recalled, nonsense unfathomable, oddly distressing. His wife's alarm softly cajoling her awake, he wondered if it bothered him that the alarm on his phone didn't allow him such an alluring choice to sleep through.
He turned his attention back to the coffee, recognizing that feeling of first world hunger, and mindlessly reviewed his options for quelling it. Nothing he thought of motivated him to move. He came to understand that he had no fucks to give about anything and entropy planted him firmly on the couch. As she left for work, his wife sweetly reminded him of today's "have to's", to which he pursed his lips and thought, "yup, just put them on my bill".
Yeah. It was going to be one of those kind of days.
