having not had a regular job in over 9 years, i still regard saturday as saturday, and sunday as sunday. i don’t know if i should be disappointed with myself on account of this, or disillusioned, or dis-somethinged. iwould like to imagine that days of weeks do not exist, but the reality of surrounding human beings is that days do matter, and hours of the days do matter. like a lot of things, you can not call your lawyer at 1am and expect an answer. i experimented with timelessness, with living in no regard for the day of the week or the hour of the day. it gave me the shits, and made me ill in many ways.
during the winter i slept until 4pm most days, stayed up until 7am, or when the sun rose, whichever that was. i can’t deal with sunrise, with staying up past the sun coming up. it’s a dull panic that arises when the glow of the sun rises up from the eastern horizon.
i had a memorable wake-up call at about 3:30 pm a few months ago. sirens raging, these sirens sounded different from most. normally i hear a siren or 2 at a time, but this time there were 6 or 7, all loud as hell, competing amongst themselves for primacy of noise and gutteral exclamation of emergency. they woke me up from my light-proof room and sent me out of doors, earlier than usual, into the light of the setting sun.
i walked a few blocks toward 21st Street, and on the way saw that a city block had been cordoned off by the police. i didn’t necessarily know to make a connection between that situation and the sirens of about 20 minutes earlier, but i later would put it together.
i walked to 21st Street and saw a police vehicle i had never seen before. i later learned it was an NYPD Bearcat semi-armoured tank, and that it was responding to a report of gunfire at the housing projects nearby.
police arrived to find a suicided young man in his apartment. earlier he had walked in to a pharmacy with a bouquet of flowers. he presented the flowers to his ex-wife who worked there, then threw the flowers to the floor to reveal a gun, with which he shot her through the face and head, killing her. he then returned to his apartment and used the gun on himself. that fired up the bearcat semi-tank vehicle, which i saw roar down 21st Street, racing to the scene of the suicide. the cordoned off street was where the murder had just occurred.
the next day the door at the place where the woman was killed was an orchid of flowers, and a cathedral of candles. dozens of people stood outside, and for weeks afterward i heard tlak on the streetcorners of “FUCK ALL, MAN, THAT SHIT’S INTENSE.”
the incident would never have registered on my radar had it not occurred 2 blocks away from my peaceful abode, and had it not raised me from a late afternoon wintertime slumber therein.
