The Past in Present Tense

"Oh Jeece.."  I moan, and it's morning.  At least, I hope it's morning.

What time is it?  Oh, yeah.  I look to the clock.

"12 O'Clock."  In the midnight?  In the morning?  I can't tell, my blinds are closed.  I walk to

the window and pull up the blinds.

"Well, shit.  It's 12 at night.  God damn." You see, I have this horrible problem with sleep.  I'm awake for 20 hours, and I fall asleep for 4, and I'm awake again; I feel fully rested.  You might think that this is a good thing, something to enjoy, but it isn't.  I swear to god I could go insane with this lack of sleep.  It's not like this problem has always been around, and I don't know when it started, exactly.  What I do for a living is I write.  I write a lot, and I'm writing now.  Right now, I'm writing about a man that can sleep for ages, because I write about what I want.  I don't live off my writing, heavens no.  If I were to write The Great American Novel, it would be about how I need to use the restroom, or how I need to eat something or even how I need to rub one out so I can fall asleep.  I work at Seven Eleven, which is a horrible place to work if you can never sleep for more than four hours.  Working at Seven Eleven is one of those occupations in which you go to sleep immediately after you're done working, to forget the fact that you work at Goddamn Seven Eleven.  Instead, I'm here writing a memoir or whatever so I can think.  If I don't have something to write on, I'll start thinking aloud, and my neighbors will start thinking I'm more crazy than they already do.  It all started about two weeks ago, back when I had a roommate.

The Past in The Present Tense

"Yo, Ivan." Joe says to me, but I'm in a daze so all I hear is a murmur or something.

"Urgghhhh.." I lift my head and glance at him coldly.  A classic Ivan-style yawn is let out by who else but myself, Ivan.

"Comon, man.  We gotta get over to the Seven Eleven in Mason." Joe is my boss.

Hrf.  "Alright.  I'll be right there.  You driving?"

"Sure, we gotta leave right now."

I'll explain right now that I'm living with my boss, Joe.  Our store is in Mason, and he refers to it as an 'out-of-town' location because he manages all the local Seven Elevens; he's also a gigantic asshole with too much Goddamn energy; Joe is the kind of guy that'll bolt up a flight of stairs in ten flat and then hop around and do that Rocky thing forever, while yelling.  In essence, he's a real airbag. That dumb bastard.

Anyways, we're heading to the Mason location, my store, and it's something like 4 in the morning or some other horribly ungodly hour.  Streetlights are still on, and the sun is nowhere in sight, and sad people are strolling about doing god-knows-what in this god forsaken suburb.  The bastards are probably all hopped on something, in fact not even probably, they all are; it's a damned fact of these horrible ghetto suburbs.  If I had a choice I'd live in Italy or somewhere nice like that, but I really don't know. Parophernelia runs rampant in this part of the city, really.  You learn about it at four and you're doing it at eight.  When you're not skipping school, you're a real hellian in class; in fact in Mason the teacher suicide rates are incredibly high compared to that of dentists in the area (which is odd, because everybody hates Dentists). Sex at 12, a kid at 14, and then you're fucked.  Everybody is and was fucked in Mason, but I guess that's why everybody's so close together, because they all lived the same goddamn life.  Four, eight, twelve, fourteen.  They're all divisible by two, but that's besides the point.  To you, at least.

"Ivan, you have the keys?" Yes, I have the keys.

"Yeah, I got em." What are we doing up at four in the morning again?

"Just open up, you're pulling a double shift today." What the fuck?

"Alright Jo-- Boss." What an asshole.

"Thanks." He motherfucking drives off all hunkydory, goddamnit.  I wish I could make people do double shifts for little to no reason with a fucking SMILE on my face and drive the fuck away.  Oh well, it's not like I have anything useful to do anyways, seeing as how I can't sleep or anything that would be of any use.  Why haven't I taken up meth yet?  Whatever, back to work.

I unlock the door, check the safety device, turn on all the lights and refrigerators, restock this damn place and then lay a pillow on the front table so I can rest while I wait for the first low-life to walk through the doors to buy some twinkies or cigarettes or beer or who-cares-what.

Some old lady with nine cats literally attached to her scuttles in hurriedly with puffs of cold air pouting out of her little puckery-lips.  Makes me sick, she comes in every day at five to get some milk and cream and some cat nip (I swear to god she takes this herself and deprives her cat of it.  I call her cunt woman to myself, of course.  It's only logical.) Her favorite thing to do is look at all the milk and read the expiration dates, and she always gets the one that's going to go bad in the year 2,040 or something. I always check the date, and it's always about a month or so ahead.

"Excuse me, sir." She has this raspy old cooter voice and it drives me crazy.  It's kinda like, if you can even imagine this, somebody took a purring cat and somehow managed to strangle it but keep it purring, and it's screaming and flailing around all crazy-like, like a fan or something kooky like that.

"Mm. What?" I am ever so chipper in the morning, tee-hee!  Fuckin' dumb.

"You are all out of two percent." She goddamn lisps the 'c' in percent.  Gah, dumb cunt woman.

"Let me check our stock."  What I do is, though, I go into the cold room and I fucking take a cigarette and I fucking smoke it.  It's grand.  She thinks I'm doing work, and she can't check because I'm a mother fuckin' employee and she isn't.  I grab the first milk I see and I walk back into the room and set it on the counter.

"That'll be two ninety-nine." I get prepared to open the register with the most brilliant of enthusiasm.

"Excuse me, sonny." Oh Jesus Christ! What?!

"This here milk is going to expire in a week.  Do you have any later dated milks?" Can you form a sentence? Jesus Christ.

So I walk into the cold room, get ANOTHER fuckin' cigarette and smoke it twice as slow, and while I'm doing this I say things like "Oh, I'm looking around back for a later date, madame," and "I found one that's pretty late but I'll make sure that it's the latest," but it's great because I'm not doing a mother-fucking thing.  I'm smoking a goddamn cigarette.  It's awesome.  After finishing my 'work' I walk I grab a relatively 'long-dated' milk and head back into the room and set it on the counter.

"Two ninety-nine, please." She scans the goddamn milk like a goddamn inspecter.  Goddamnit.

"Ohkie, boy." She draws out the 'y' in boy.  Christ, that's annoying.  Anyways, she gets her purse out and rifles around, and the cats that are stuck to her are mewing, because they see the milk, and if Pavlov told me anything it's that cats drool when they see milk and cream and that kinda stuff.  At least, that's what I learned.  In the slowest way possible (this way being through nickels and dimes and mother fucking Susan B. Anthony coins, and pennies and fifty cent pieces and all that goddamn shit) she pays the two ninety-nine.  A Susan B. Anthony coin, a fifty cent piece, another fifty cent piece, and what looks like at least seven dimes and five nickels, and some extra pennies to boot.  Great, now I have a Susan B. Anthony coin, a fifty cent piece, another fifty cent piece, and what looks like at least seven dimes and five nickels, and some pennies.  Great, now I have a Susan B. Anthony coin. What the fuck am I going to do with this?  I can't give it back as change, nobody'll accept it, it's a goddamn Susan B. Anthony coin, for Christ sake!

"Thank you madame, I wish you the most wonderful of mornings." Oh God I'm hilariously cruel.

She looks at me skiddishly, and as she turns around to say goodbye, she's looking at me all concerned-like.

"Ohkie, boy." Another drawn out 'y.'  Retarded!

I'm going to skip along, because the rest of the morning is pretty typical.  There's Crazy Jack, Cracky Conroy, Squeeky Jim, Molestor Michael, Pedo Paul, and the rest of the loonies.  It's fun to watch shop-lifting, really, because they always act like it's some big deal.  Of course, it is, but I don't care enough to stop it.  I recall the most I've ever done to try to stop it was raising my hand and saying "Hey."  More of a greeting than Justice, but whatever.  After my double shift, I go back home, and I sleep for a while.  A real long while, which for me is at least 5 hours.  I just recently took up writing, and I should do it more often.  Life seems more interesting when you can play it over in your head.

At least, that's how I see it.



Anyways, my life has been 'spiraling downwards' for a lack of a better term or phrase or whatever, because the less I sleep the crazier I get, and the more I write.  I'm thinking I'm insane now, because I can't Goddamn stop observing the way people do things and say things, the way that people move about in a crowd; through a crowd; when they think about crowds, even.  The first time I realized this was when I wrote about that cat lady, who, by the way, died just recently.  She expired before her milk.  It's funny, kind of, but not really.  At least she was more polite than others.  I wonder what she did as a little girl.  Oh, Christ, there I go again with all this thought.  Maybe I can't sleep because I have to observe stupid trivial shit like that.  Goddamn.