Work: Sam Moore
01. Writer
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Sam Moore
02. Theme
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Work
03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Rozwell Kid:
Kangaroo Pocket
04. WRITING
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I rustled my blankets, turned over, and glanced at the clock. 3:52 a.m. A little over two hours before that alarm clock would screech itself into oblivion, waking me up for work. Why is it that my brain can’t shut off when it knows it has to be up early? I need to be up in a few hours, I could hear it say. So now’s as good a time as any to run a mental marathon of every anxious thought I’ve ever had!
I imagined my brain, all wrinkled and squishy, sneering at me while it told me this. “You bastard,” I said out loud in response to this nonexistent conversation. It’s a vicious cycle: needing sleep, can’t sleep, wake up sleepy, rinse and repeat. Day in and day out.
What I wouldn’t give to just punt my brain like a damn football. Just walk it into the backyard, square up, and blast that sucker over the fence as far as I could. Watch it fly off and plummet like a doomed rocket back to earth, crash land in the neighbor’s yard. Watch their mutt gnaw on it like a toy. Ha ha.
Sigh.
I rustle back the other direction and yank the blanket over my head and groan. My leg dangles off the bed in No Man’s Land, unprotected by a cover, exposed in demon territory. That’s how I know I’m tired. Everyone knows you are absolutely fair game to whatever ghouls lurk under the bed if your leg is sticking out.
Try me, monsters. I’m too tired to care.
Is it possible to be too tired to sleep? I wonder.
Lately I’ve felt especially tired. The kind of tired that seeps deep into your bones, burrows its way into your head. A heavy, thick, syrupy exhaustion that feels impossible to wade through. I work all day and spend all night in my homemade darkroom, hunched over trays and chemicals and images for hours on end. Photography is just a hobby, but what else is there to do in life except work and have a hobby? It’s nice making some prints and selling, oh, maybe one or two a month if I’m lucky, but I don’t know what else to do with my time or how to stop aimlessly chugging away at a thing I find fulfilling.
By now I can see splinters of light cutting through the blinders and hear a bird or two chirping outside. Has that much time already passed that we are now passing from middle-of-the-night to beginning-of-the-morning? I rustle more without ever getting comfortable. My fan drones on, but even white noise can’t lull me to sleep. I make a conscious decision not to look at the clock from here on out until my alarm goes off--looking at the time now will only make me realize I have even less time to sleep, causing me to get even more anxious, making it even more difficult to finally pass out.
I’m. Not. Looking.
Five seconds later I am awake and the clock is screaming itself to death and I want to set the entire world on fire.
I roll over and crumple out of bed like a bag of bones just spilled all over the floor. For a brief moment I consider this predicament: I have, essentially, slipped from one bed (my bed) onto a perfectly fine new bed (the floor). What good fortune! I think. Today I must be destined to sleep more! Who am I to argue with Fate?
Then I realize that if I don’t get up now--right now--I actually will stay put, accidentally doze off again, sleep through the rest of my alarm, miss my shift at work, get written up, then fired, lose my paycheck, and, thus, my room in this apartment. That would mean access to no beds, which is far less than the amount I have access to now (ie two: bed, floor). I could skip showering and give myself an extra ten or so minutes of Floor Time, but ultimately decide against it.
Fate is cruel. I force myself up from the floor that desperately needs to be vacuumed with the same gusto I imagine the greatest heroes in history have channeled in their darkest moments, right before they turn the tide of battle and claim victory. Then I scratch my ass on the way to the kitchen and eat spoonfuls of peanut butter for breakfast directly out of the jar.
I stand in front of the mirror wrapped in a towel, holding up my toothbrush in one hand and the tube of off-brand toothpaste (Crust™) in the other. I stare into my own face for the first time in a while and realize I look like shit. Like exhausted shit. No matter. All I have to do is show up at work and mindlessly stock shelves. They don’t pay me to look good.
I begin scrubbing the clumps of peanut butter out of my teeth when I feel a strange sensation in my head. It feels itchy, fuzzy, but not all over. More like a line of itchy fuzziness, straight as an arrow, circling the inside of my skull. For a moment I wonder if I’ve hit the level of caffeine intake that requires coffee first thing in the morning or your head starts to hurt (I’m only drinking a pot a day), but this feels different. I ignore it and continue brushing.
I am nearly done when the strange feeling sharpens quickly and I immediately recoil. Something feels deeply, deeply wrong--I lean over the sink and stare at myself hard in the mirror and look for any sign of anything. My eyes dart back and forth, an urgent paranoia jutting out of my every cell. Nothing is happening as far as I can tell, but I feel like something is happening and the “not-seeing-but-feeling” feeling is making my skin crawl and I don’t know what to do except stare into my own face and wait.
This is when the top of my head flipped open like a lid and my brain crawled out like a sleeper agent awakening from its cryochamber.
A burst of vapor puffed out, even made the psssshhhhhhh noise as my head opened up. My brain was now on the sink, staring up at me.
“Whuhhhduhhfuhhh?” I said through a mouth of toothpaste.
“You can prolly close that,” my brain said, gesturing up. “Don’t want anything wandering in that oughta not be there.” I took note and closed my head.
“What the fu--”
“Save it. You’re gonna be late for work.” My brain hopped down off the sink and started walking away. I realized my brain looked smoother than I imagined as it trotted off. Was it supposed to be that smooth?
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” it snapped. “I have no idea. I just need a break. I gotta get out of that head of yours. You’re a real mess, you know that?”
“What are you even talking about?”
“All these thoughts you’re having, all day long? I hear them all. And they are dumb. And mean. I’m working overtime just to keep you functioning, man. If I don’t take a break I’m gonna lose my mind.”
If I still had a brain I would ponder the thought of my brain losing its mind, but since I don’t, I didn’t.
“So that’s it? You’re just...leaving? When will you be back?”
“I dunno,” my brain shrugged. “Haven’t really thought that far ahead. Why do you care?”
“I just feel like I’m supposed to have a brain.”
“Not my problem.”
My brain lept up and turned the handle on the front door and swung it open. I followed it outside onto the sidewalk. It left tiny blotches of goopy juice on the ground with each step.
“Wait!” I called out as it made its way onto the street. It turned and looked.
“Aren’t you supposed to be more wrinkly?”
My brain glared at me, then dove into a sewer drain.
Just like that I was left standing on my apartment porch with a brain no longer in my head. I didn’t know what else to do so I said “shit” to myself and went back to getting ready for work.
When I went back inside my roommate Jeff was up. He was having a morning beer at the kitchen table with his laptop open. Then again, Jeff operates on strange hours so this could be the equivalent of a night-beer for him.
“Morning, buddy. Hey, you ok? You look like shit.” Jeff always had a way with words that way, knew just how to cheer a guy up.
“My brain unlatched my head and climbed out and dove into a sewer.”
“Ha! That’s hilarious, man. We all have those days.”
“No, I’m serious. That literally happened. Just now.”
Jeff paused for a moment, then downed his (night?) beer and set the can down on the table with a hollow clunk. His belly peeked out from under his Metallica shirt he’d been wearing for several days straight as he leaned back and sighed heavily.
“Shit.”
“That’s what I said.”
“I was about to call it a night, but I can’t leave you hanging like this. Lemme see what I can do.” Jeff cracked his knuckles and began furiously typing away.
To be honest I’m still not sure what Jeff does. He pays his bills each month to my eternal surprise and gratitude, but I couldn’t tell you how. He doesn’t work any sort of 9-5, doesn’t head off anywhere at night. Barely leaves the apartment, or his room for that matter. All I know is he’s good with computers. Maybe he’s a hacker.
Neither of us had said anything for...how long now? Don’t feel like doing the math. It’s been a while, though. Once Jeff snaps into focus there’s no shaking him, so I sat there and let him do his thing. Cartoons played on the tv while his keyboard clacked away. A couple more cans had accumulated on the table next to him.
“Hey, you told work you weren’t coming in, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“What’d you tell them?”
I shrugged. “The truth. Didn’t really have the mental energy to cook up a lie.”
Jeff pushed his glasses up, back into focus after they slid down his nose. “So you just told them your brain hopped out of your head and took off down a sewer drain? How’d they take it?”
“Not great. My supervisor was yelling something like ‘how dumb do you think I am’ or something like that. But as far as I can tell I did the right thing. Most people just lie when they don’t want to come in.”
“Huh, guess you got a point there. Anyway, come take a look at this.”
Jeff spun his laptop around on the table to face us both. It showed a complex graph accompanied by a map with multiple diverting paths. “So I did some digging to figure out where that sewer drain could lead to. I’ve narrowed it down to a few different places, if you wanna try and find it.”
“This is what you’ve been working on this entire time? How’d you even figure all this out?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Jeff said quickly. “Worry about whether you’re gonna find your brain. As you can see, there’s at least a handful of different places that pipe could spit out at. But your brain clearly has a mind of its own, so something tells me it could end up going wherever it pleases once it finds an exit.”
“Yeah, he’s a real bastard,” I said.
Jeff shook his fourth can, listening for any of those last Secret Drops. He swigged them back and added the can to the growing night/morning collection.
“So,” he began, suddenly serious. “We have some possible leads as to where your brain could be. It won’t be easy, it’ll take a lot of hard work, and there’s no guarantee it’ll pay off. Such is the risk of adventure. But we could track it down, get you back to normal, and save the day. What do you say? Are you up for it?”
I pictured a massive orchestra behind Jeff as he spoke, inspiring music swelling behind his words. I pondered what this could mean for me. Was I up for the call to adventure?
“Honestly, no.”
“Okay, thank God, man,” Jeff said as if he had been holding his breath. “‘Cause, me either. You wanna get high and watch Die Hard instead?”
“If this is their idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year’s!” said Argyle on the TV, then walked out of frame. The credits started to roll. It was only nine in the morning but I had already watched Bruce Willis kill ten people.
“Damn, that movie still rocks.”
“Yeah, man. It rocks a lot. How you feelin’, anyway? Your head okay?”
“Honestly, I feel...kinda great. I’m not at work, I’ve got nothing to do, and no pressure on myself to do anything despite that.”
Jeff got up and put the DVD in for the next Die Hard movie. “I’m real glad to hear it, man. I know I’m not one to talk, but you’ve seemed real cooped up lately. Either working all day at that awful job or tucked away in your darkroom, hunched over your supplies in the dark for hours on end like a damn goblin. Which rocks, don’t get me wrong, but you’ve been neglecting a very important art form lately, if you’ll allow me to say so.”
I cocked my head to the side. “What art form is that?”
“The art of being a lazy piece of shit from time to time. Now that I think about it, I bet that’s why your brain booked it outta here. It’s probably been running on fumes and needs to recharge. When’s the last time you just took a day to do nothing--like what we’re doing now?”
I thought back as far as I could but came up with nothing. “I don’t know,” I said.
“My point exactly. This is just what the doctor ordered, man. Here, let’s watch the next one. It’s basically the same as the first one, but in an airport.”
“Cool,” I said.
By the end of the day we had watched the entire Die Hard franchise. They really go off the rails towards the end.
It was now dark out. Jeff and I were surrounded by a graveyard of empty beer cans and pizza boxes. There was still no sign of my brain by the end of the day, but I was surprisingly calm about it.
“So, the third one is better than the second one, but the fourth one is better than the fifth one, and the third one is the second best, but none of them are as good as the original. I’ve watched them all enough to know. I’ve crunched the numbers and these are the official rankings.” Jeff leaned back with his hands behind his head, satisfied with his assessment.
“I think you’re right, man.”
A week had passed and I was still brainless. I had started going back to work (turns out it didn’t take much mental effort to stock shelves. I got written up for the first day I called in, but several other people called in the following day and they shifted their anger towards them instead), and spent my downtime playing mindless video games and watching cartoons. There was a part of me that felt guilty about not being “productive” outside of work when I had the time. I could be working on some prints, trying to promote them, if I’m (very) lucky sell a piece or two. But I would be lying if I said this was a nice change of pace. And that pace was “slowing down as much as possible for a while.” Basking in a season of recharge.
It was almost two weeks before my brain came around, appearing on my porch smoking a cigarette.
“Welcome back,” I said.
It took a long drag and exhaled deeply. “Yep. Just felt like it was time.”
“What were you doing that whole time?”
“Traveling, sight-seeing. Doing a lot of thinking. What about you?”
Bruce Willis popped in my head, saying swear words.
“Same,” I said.
“Glad to hear it. Look, you and I--we gotta figure out a system that makes this work. You know? Love it or hate it, we’re stuck. And in the past we’ve clashed and exhausted each other and fought and messed things up. So whaddya say? You scratch my ass, I’ll scratch yours. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said and we went inside.