Inventory (Rough Draft)
He wore only a pair of underwear, one of fourteen he had in his possession, although he had three pairs of pajamas in his drawers which he could utilize if he needed to. They were rather large on him due to their being purchased prior to a period of time when Gerry was liquidate his weight. However, recently, he had began packing on the pounds again, reverting to old bad habits, including drinking sugary carbonated soda and eating convenient fastfood meals like hamburgers and fries. He had also stopped running.
Outside the door his bedroom, one of the five cats he owned was mewing a prayerful little cry and rubbing her paws along the door. Gerry’s cats were a inexhaustible well of humor, there idiosyncrasies constantly given him pleasure. One such behavior their ability to anticipate so that scheduled activities such as feeding time or his arrival home from work were expected and even demanded at earlier and earlier times. Case in point, it was only seven in the morning, and, Gerry suspected, Pietro the most mischievous of his cats was begging for food even though he had been fed eight in the morning the prior morning, and the morning before that, and the morning before that, and so on.
Next to Gerry, his wife groaned from a night of restless sleep. When he had last seen her, she had been watching the news on one of the many cable channels that was broadcasted into their bedroom. She had been watching commentary on the most recent violent incident occur many miles away from their home but ever present in the repeating scenes of bloodied and hysterical people on the screen. This time, it was a failed military coup in Turkey. It was the fifth such event in the last month, coming right after an terrorist attack in Nice, France, the second such terrorist attach in France within the last year.
Right before the Nice incident, the news had reported on the tragic attack by a disgruntled discharged army man who killed three police officers in Dallas, Texas, spurred by two seperate incidents in which law enforcement officers had shot and killed two black men.
Now, the television ran the images of the people of Turkey massing on the streets, walking in unity against the threatened coup per the instruction of the Turkish prime minister. It was the sixth time that Gerry had seen the footage, that is if you didn’t count the fact that the each time they played the video, they repeated it at least three times back-to-back like it was the McGruder film footage.
Gerry had actually woke two hours ago when his alarm clock buzzed at five o’clock. His energy levels were at a one being depleted by the fact that he had chosen to close his eyes at eleven o’clock p.m. the night after scanning the internet for things he had missed out on. At five, he had pressed the sleep button on his alarm clock six times, each button equaling ten minutes of time he advised his alarm clock that he needed to permit his body to obtain one or two more energy levels. At six, the alarm clock had buzzed again, and, after taking a quick assessment of his energy levels and motivational rating, Gerry decided that another hour was needed, and pressed the sleep button six more times in rapid repetition.
At seven o’clock, the assessment was different in that regardless of energy levels and motivational ratings, Gerry had to contend with the fact that there were only twenty four hours in the day. Necessity required him to be at work at eight-thirty in the morning, nine at the very latest. Gerry’s time to preparation time in the morning was one hour thirty minutes. It took him only five minutes to drive to his parking space at work, but ten minutes to walk to work. He deliberately parked two blocks away from his office so that he forced himself to exercise. He calculated that it 900 steps from his parking space to his office desk, during which walk he was required to take five flights of stairs.
It was Friday, which meant he had survived four days of working. It also meant that he had eight hours of additional work before having two days of relaxation before starting another five days of working eight hours. He was paid last Friday, and so it was another seven days before he would be paid again.
He pressed the number five on the remote control that his wife had left laying between them, serving like the sword that laid between Tristan and Isolde, keeping the love between them pure and unexpressed. The morning news variety show with its fours hosts appeared on the screen, one black lesbian with a sports background, one Greek-Orthodox man who, despite having married a comic, was like cardboard, a white woman clearly functioning to gather the rural, more conservative Americans who had a show on one of the more country-fried cable channels on which involved refurbishing old furniture, and one former athlete with a friendly gap-tooth grin.
Gerry gave himself five minutes to watch the top-of-the-hour “news” before rising from bed. The first story was of course the Turkish coup, and Gerry saw for a seventh the footage which had been passed around the various news agencies. The second story was about the comments on the Turkish situation by the two presumed party nominees for the presidential election, who took to the air to show how that despite being many miles away, the other nominee had been at fault for causing the coup. It was four months until the election but already Gerry had been exhausted by the coverage on the race.
Gerry didn’t wait for the third story to air before rising from his bed to go take a bath. His elderly cat who had accumulated twenty years of life slept soundly in her crate, a place of comfort for her since she had lost her eyesight one and half years ago.
He grabbed his tablet which had been charging at the side of his bed. It was one of four tablets he owned, one of two that he had dedicated to the purpose of using for viewing “media.” It was a 10” tablet which was large enough to watch movies on or to read comics on or to read e-books on. He had another 10” tablet which he used for purposes of work, which was four years old. He liked his work tablet since it had been manufactured with a stylus and served well for him to take notes on.
He owned smaller tablets, one easier to carry, that could even fit in his pocket, or which had longer battery life, lasting days instead of hours. But they were older, less interesting, or distracting. Further, he had only a limited number of electric outlets in his house for which the number of his devices competed for a spot. It was bad enough that he had to utilize a power strip at various locations in the house to plug in the multiple televisions, cable boxes, printers, and cell phones that he and his wife owned.
He picked up his cell phone and saw that the charge was at 100 percent. He also saw that there was five emails which had accumulated in his in box, but they were just promotional emails luring him to spend money on clothing.
“I’m going to take my bath,” he said into the air. His one wife didn’t say anything.
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