getting my #2 time back

Friday, and despite thinking this whole evening that I wasn’t going to write, here I am sitting down at 10:30pm giving it the old college try.

My favorite thing about Friday?  It’s always followed by Saturday and that’s the day a bunch of people come over to our house to watch college football all day.  Thursday, even Thursday’s good because it’s almost Friday.  But, whatever…

You know when everything is going right with your complicated animated Halloween props and you’re all like, “Man, my complicated animated Halloween props are dialed-in this year!”  You’re all proud and happy and triumphant and stuff?  Isn’t that always the time that the blacklight you have mounted to the underside of the porch decides to fall off and hang in the path of your crank ghost’s motor arm?  You know, totally tangling the thing into a twisted mess and nearly overworking the motor to the point of death?  Yeah man, me too.  That crap always happens to me.  Ugh… just more work guys… just more work…

Keaton likes to do this new thing where, while I’m seated in the bathroom, she opens the door and asks me, among other random and non-urgent questions, how I’m doing.  At first I found this a little disturbing – as even in my own house around the woman I’ve been with for fifteen years, I’m a door-closed kinda #2 guy.  But, as she continued to do it (displaying an almost ESP-esque knack for knowing when I’m pinching a loaf), I guess I sort of got used to it.  Lately though, I’ve taken to latching the door while I’m in there.

Why?  I’ll tell you why.

I miss my smelly little sanctuary.  No one used to bother me in that room; I could read the Newsweek (or stray People if Sharaun had left one), surf the internet on my iPhone (is that gross?  I kinda think it might be gross), or simply rest my chin on my hands and enjoy the silence.  And, as much as I love my daughter – even to the point of allowing her to interrupt my bomb-dropping – I just need my time, y’all.  So, she’ll come to the door, fiddle with the handle, ask me, in a muffled voice, “Dad?  What are you doing, Dad?,” and eventually give up when I don’t let her in.

And that’s how I got my #2 time back.  Goodnight.

Also written on this day...

• reclaimation - 2019
• we're doing this wrong - 2018
• whither hast thou gone? - 2006
• no jetlag - 2005
• eating & prioritization - 2003