PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE
RETICULATED DAYS IN THE LIVES OF A REGULAR MAN
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 CHAPTER 11
Four hours sleep. Four hours. For four hours furred & whirled deep in dream recesses. A mere four hours of sleep & I'm awake like a radio in my screeching static asshole. Shit...
Steady 3rd shift is unkind to the idea of sleep.
I'm listening to a boot-leg Tom Waits that Lonnie gave me, & a low jet hollowing out space to Erie International Airport a few miles away. Sound ain't the problem, except for sounds in dreams. That's the end gulp to the 2nd cup of instant coffee, & here's the 3rd cigarette. Four hours of sleep & I'm feeling gruesome.
I'm dreaming of divorce, out & out get the fuck out, & like stalk Tom Waits or something for the rest of my life. Diane makes me nauseous, just the sight of her face or the stink of her perfume in the disastrous bed-room (like a plane-crash with things & clothes shredded everywhere) where I'm a stone skipping water one two three four times & my eyes don't close on the idiot afternoon hours. The dust in the livingroom is one & a half inches thick. She's being naturally schizophrenic again, & acting like her real asshole 38 year old self being my "wife". I've learned to despise that word. It is not I'm imagining some Ideal Wife, don't negate me like that. Diane can be awfully awfully ugly & not just physically. I hate her ugliness.
Judy wasn't at work last night. The time-clock looked empty this morning at 5 to 7 since Judy is USUALLY the first one there leaning on a post looking so weary & beaten smoking her generic cigarette. Rich, the supervisor, emotionally & heartful, told me about his daughter Sarah breaking her arm over the weekend & the grief & pain of being a parent. I ended up not being able to speak, & he apologized for laying all of this on me.
"No problem, Rich."
This 6'6" 300 pound monster of a man was squeezed to tears telling me the ordeal & its complications. Not just a simple break. Sarah is seven. I stood at my machine not running nothing with eventual down-cast eyes at the factory floor. There is so much that humbles us. I wanted to give him a Gibran quote about Joy & Pain, but I guess rightfully stayed quiet.
The job I ran hadn't been run in seven years. It was an old mold with too many steps involved to let the mind wander. One wrong move & I cld rip the thing off the platen. I had to keep aware what I was doing & remember the sequences of tooling. Blocks & inserts & goddamn porosity on the parts. I was glad when I finished the order, that I had accomplished such a feat 70 fucking times thru the shift, thru the night.