I had to shave today before I left the house.
I’ve not shaved with a razor in years, I just use an old pair of clippers with no attachment, which leaves me with a slight bristle of stubble but it’ll do. The clippers tend to stick at first and need to be oiled or else I have to toggle the lever to extend them an eight of an inch over and over again until the friction melts the congealed oil from previous uses. That’s what thinking is like these days, a repetitive switch-flicking until the encrusted and congealed re-achieves a liquid enough state for some degree of real motion to begin. Is it age or ennui? (This isn’t especially sincere, it’s an overstatement that I’m playing with.)
Anyway, my clippers shook off their existential angst then trimmed the old face and then I needed a shower so as to not spend the day all itchified. I don’t know why it is that my tiny hairs are such an irritant to the skin, though to be fair they’re an irritant to look at as well. So I showered and that left little time to fix anything to eat before work. I had the great idea to stop at Jimmy John’s for a sandwich because they’re fast and on the way to work. When I got back to my car I had a sandwich full of multiple kinds of coldcuts plus some lettuce. I briefly considered eating it or picking the meat off but that sounded gross and likely to give me a stomach ache (I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 18). Luckily I’d bought a bag of potato chips so all was not lost, but pretty close. I ate my back up protein bar after the chips and protein bar’s never been more disappointing. After I got done with work I ordered pizza for pick up, it was my wife’s idea, her sister’s in town, so that turned the day around a bit.
Then the zombie attack came. From all sides they crowded in around my van, all the vehicles on the road, so many that sometimes the wheels spun without the van moving forward, like driving in a deep snow, as they fell beneath the van. And that’s time, thank goodness.
