Back in the day it seemed like nothing was easy. The alarm clock would go off, and instead of being responsible and waking up, I would just incorporate the annoying chirp, bell or ring into a dream. The truth is, this still happens today once in a while, but not nearly as much. I would run off of 3 hours of sleep and think I could get up early. It never happened, but I always thought it would. I would stay up running around doing my thing, come home, and get high and drunk, watch The Wire non stop on Comcast On Demand, and fall asleep on the couch leaving my wife in bed alone. Then I would get up in the middle of the night, like 4am, because my body needed more, handle that, then go to bed believing that my wife wouldn’t know that I didn’t get in bed at a decent hour. That never happened either. So the alarm would go off (when I did have a job) and I would “snooze button” the shit out of it until I could get up. Then I would get high, and drag myself around like a zombie for the rest of the day. At one point I was handling the biggest financial transactions a family would make in their lives all while nodding out at my desk. I watched “Boiler Room” and you couldn’t convince me that I wasn’t Giovanni Ribisi. I would stand up in my cube, talking slick to these people about why they didn’t want to do things their way, and why they did want to do things my way. I certainly never told them that my way put a few thousand dollars in my pocket and their way saved them forty thousand dollars over the life of their loan.
I snuck out at lunch if I had too. I made pit stops on my way home if I had to. I got faded once I was home, then I did it all over again the next day. I also would never understand why things weren’t going my way. Why I continually got speeding tickets, why it seemed like everybody was mad at me, why I couldn’t pay bills when I made more than enough to do that. I would get in bar fights, I would get arrested, I would make stupid mistakes at work, I made broken promise after broken promise and worst of all….I never parented my children properly, and never was a good partner to my wife. This I can never take back.
I had a flash back of this today. My son and I had some time to kill, so I asked him if he wanted to go help me vacuum and wash my car. He seemed to be overly excited about saying yes. So we left, stopped at the gas station to fuel up and get change for the machines. I filled up, went inside and paid with the only cash I had on me. Then I realized I should’ve bought the gas with my card, and saved the cash for the machines. So we went to my bank to withdraw some cash. My son reminded me from the back seat “But Daddy, we already went to the bank today.”
When I took the money out, the receipt said I had $100 less in my account than I should. I pulled up to the window and asked the girl why. She told me that the check I deposited (which was drawn off of the same bank) wouldn’t clear right away. I said that’s fine but usually it clears right away because its the same bank. She disagreed. I said ok, and carried on. So we finally made it to the car wash, and the machine only accepted ones, fives and tens….not twenties which was of course what I had. It was very hot and my car doesn’t have air conditioning and I was getting a little bit bothered. I told Canaan to hop back in the car because we had to get change. When I went to pull out of the car wash, there was traffic going both ways. When we finally got the change, and headed back to the car wash, I wiped the sweat from my head and turned around to my son saying “You know Canaan, nothing’s ever easy!”
He smiled at me. He was perfectly content to disagree and softly spoke: “Ya ha Daddy, saying ‘I love you is easy’.”