Laziness Story

Where Laziness Goes

I am the laziest person that people know. The people that know me agree wholeheartedly that I am unequivocally the laziest person they know about. I am not really boasting about that. Rather, I want to suggest that what I’m going to relate is important stuff, given that the degree of my laziness usually keeps me from doing much beyond a bi-weekly shower, opening cans of food or bags of potato chips, putting a drink outdoors and waiting for the absolute zero of the Indiana winter to take it down to drinking temperature. So, here goes my story, although don’t be very surprised if I don’t get very far along. It’s hard work telling stories.

A few weeks ago the girl I had been spending the lion’s share of my time with walked out of my apartment. She forgot to slam the door behind her. She did turn around and say these words to me: “You are the laziest person in the history of time. You’re so lazy that I wouldn’t be surprised if things actually started undoing themselves from your life experience in revolt of your inability to move forward with anything.” Needless to say, I was very relieved that she left. There were good things about her though. She used to cook mound after mound of spaghetti with meatballs and garlic bread. I never ate any of it. I would drink the wine that she’d buy to go with the meal. My usual thing was to take the bottle and lock myself in the bathroom. Once, she had a dinner party while I was locked away like that. The party was a real success apparently, disregarding that everyone had to use the neighbor’s bathroom and drink water instead of the wine I was enjoying there in the bathroom. That was the night she left actually, but, since she had gone to great lengths to get the place clean for the dinner party, which was also her birthday party, when she left, things were in decent shape. I think she had actually rented a carpet cleaner and spent one of her weekends off work cleaning the floors in preparation. It was a real pain for me though. I had to pack up a bag and camp out in my car for a couple nights. All the laundry was clean too. She was tireless in that department. Always picking up my socks from the floor. She had piled all my papers up the night before she left as well, so you could actually walk around without stepping on stuff. Well it was nice and all that everything was sort of straight and in order, but as one might imagine, it didn’t stay that way for very long. I started eating lots of chocolate pudding and leaving the plastic containers with spoons hanging out all over the place. I watched a lot of movies and sort of left the movies strewn all around the living room. I kept ordering chinese delivery and having to open the door to collect the steaming white boxes of noodles. The boxes were everywhere. There were books here and there too. I was writing a good bit and various pages of half written typed pages were on the kitchen table and on the sofa and in the floor. I had something like 3 novels going and 10 unfinished short stories. I think there were definitely enough poems that I could have organized them into a collection, but collecting them seemed like some sort of trial, so instead I just kept churning out new material. None of the stories were exceptional to tell the truth. But to get back to the state of things. Towels were wet and in the floor. Empty beer cans from midday and coke cans from deep into the night. Somehow I had agreed to let a Japanese kid leave all his luggage in the hall for a three month period that appeared it had become indefinite. His tv was nicer than mine so I used it and put my smaller one in the corner somewhere. Photographs were practically pouring out of the sky. Speakers to my sound system were multiplying. Somehow people were bringing me speakers and I was figuring out ways to splice them so that I had 14 speakers arranged around the couch in a Stonehenge facsimile. There were pajamas and jeans in piles. There were records upon records.
At least, there had been.
Then I started not being able to find things. I couldn’t fine a couple of my favorite movies. I watched these movies at least once a month. In down times I watched them every day. They couldn’t be found so I watched documentaries about France and that eased my mind. Then the photographs started not having the same pictures in them anymore. The ones that formerly had me in them I now had my eyes closed or I simply was no longer there. I called some friends about it to see if I was remembering the event wrong but I could never get them on the line. Lots of messages about disconnected numbers. I wound up not being able to find the phone charger. It made it hard to get food once the phone died, but I worked out an arrangement with the chinese place to deliver food at 11:30 in the morning and 7:45 at night. If I wanted something different, I had to plan in advance and tell them one trip ahead of time, but honestly, this arrangement saved me a lot of pain. It had always been too much work to ring those guys up and tell them what I had in mind to eat. I was able to deal with the missing articles of clothing and even the chair that suddenly wasn’t there anymore. When 2 o’clock disappeared I was fairly distraught. 2 o’clock was important because it was one of the few times of day that I happened to experience twice. The disappearance of 2 coincided with the vanishing of the east. At first the east was sort of hazy but then it was completely gone. Just a white nothing as far as I couldn’t see. After the east disappeared I started double bolting the door. To get my chinese food I cut out a speak easy. I’m not sure why I hadn’t done it earlier to tell the truth. Instead of exerting all the energy of opening the entire door, there was just a little port I now had to open. I also gave the chinese guy a 100 dollar bill and had him take my meal cost out of that as a tab so that most of the time I didn’t have to bother with giving him anything, I just had to open the speak easy and take the hot food. One day the food stopped arriving, and it sort of made sense. After all, the east had disappeared. I started having pizza delivered at that point, which was a perfect sort of arrangement until the west disappeared and, I can only surmise, took Italian food with it. Mexican food became my staple at that point and I was fortunate enough to find a local place that would send up cheap Mexican beer along with chips and salsa. I was kind of glad that the east and west had disappeared. I hadn’t known about the Mexican beer delivery option. One nice thing about the absence of the east and west is that heating and cooling an apartment gets much easier. I guess I have to explain that the missingness of those two directions isn’t like the absolute cold temperatures of space. That is because the east and west don’t seem to constitute anything like space now. I tentatively threw a tennis ball to the east and when it hit the place that used to be the east, it sort of shimmered, went 2D and then dissolved. It looked like I was watching graphics from a game on the original nintendo. At this point I started feeling that existential kind of fear that humans feel about life and not life, so I threw some things into a bag and as I threw them in the bag, the bag flashed out of existence. I looked out the North window and everything suddenly erased itself. I turned south and thank god there was the mexican delivery guy, but he didn’t have any beer. He said he’d be back later with beer but that turned out to be an empty promise because after he handed me lunch the south went out like the grand finale of the fourth of July. So here I am typing this all out on sheets of paper and