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ONE

Wake up. Take a shower. Perhaps make eggs or a bowl of cereal, but more likely grab a bagel and coffee from the store you pass on your way to the bus stop. Wave your credentials briefly at the security guy on your way up to your office. Sit down at your desk. Write interoffice memo. Go downstairs for a smoke. Buy fast food for lunch. Return to your desk. Fiddle with your hands, forward joke emails to your friends and write one more memo. Go home fulfilled.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

TWO

Wake up. Skip the shower, you’re in a hurry. Breakfast is a Nutri-grain bar found stuffed in your jacket pocket. Go to the coffee shop. Indulge in lattes for a few hours, jotting down ideas for your brilliant screenplay. Walk next door to your job. Smile at people as they walk in. Ask if they need help finding something. Demonstrate your knowledge of the products at hand. You are on commission. Stand around aimlessly for a few minutes during the slow hours, then take a short break. Ask your boss for a raise. Clock out, then return to coffee shop. Think about applying for a job there. You enjoy the coffee shop. They aren’t hiring. Catch the bus home.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

THREE

Wake up. Smoke your last cigarette. It’s 3 p.m. Walk down to the store beneath your apartment. Buy a pack of cigarettes and a case of cheap beer. Sit down on your couch. Call your friends and ask them to come over. Call your parents and ask them to send money. Watch TV. Buzz your friends up. Roll a joint. Pass it around as you and your friends argue over whether to watch Fraiser or Seinfeld. Order a pizza. Call more people and ask if they know anything that’s going on. Decide on a plan. Put on your jacket. Hit up some bars on your way to the club. Buy some tickets to the show. Go inside. Bounce around in an uncoordinated fashion for an hour and a half. Convince someone to give you a ride home.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

FOUR

Wake up. Step outside the trailer cab and stretch. Sit down in the driver’s seat. Put the truck in gear. Pull onto the highway. Search the local radio stations to see if anything good is on the air. Turn on your CD player. Hum along. Try to stay in the rightmost lane unless there’s a slow car in front. Honk your airhorn for students on a school trip. Change the CD. Pull into a service station. Fill the gas tank with diesel. Buy a sandwich and a bag of potato chips. Get back on the highway. Drive for a few more hours, being vigilant in not letting your attention wander. Answer some queries sent over the CB. Stop at a weigh station and scan a day-old newspaper while you wait. Keep driving. Ignore the New Yorker honking angrily as he passes. Pull into a rest stop. Step outside and stretch. Go back into the cab and set up your bed. Watch TV for half an hour before sleep.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

FIVE

Wake up. Lean over and gently wake up your significant other. Balance yourself against the slow rocking of the boat. Wake up your two friends. Cook a small breakfast in the galley–sausage, eggs, coffee. Take the boat of auto-pilot. Turn off the motor. Raise the jib only, because the wind is rather strong. Trade off on steering the boat. Smile, laugh amongst the four of you. Mix up some Bloody Marys. Raise the main sail. Stay on the rudder while others make lunch. Tack. Duck underneath the boom. Talk about the progress you’ve already made in crossing the ocean. Discuss plans for after your arrival in Europe. Make martinis. Put on some trendy music. Go inside for a coat. Check the weather around you through a laptop and your satellite phone. Step back out to the deck. Say you’re going to start cooking dinner. Make something fancy, because, well, why not? Admire the sunset. Note that pink sky at night is a sailor’s delight. Crack a bad joke about pink-eye being good for no one. Bring down the sails. Turn on the motor and put the ship back on auto-pilot. Go down into the cabin and sit around, just talking, for another few hours. Fall asleep with your arm wrapped tightly around your spouse.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

SIX

Wake up. Turn on your computer. While it is booting up, go downstairs for a can of Jolt. Come back up to your room. Sit down in front of the monitor. Begin typing. Break into another computer on the network. From that computer, break into another one. Continue until the lag as you type things is somewhere around a minute. Hack into the secret Microsoft database you heard about from one of your Counter-Strike buddies. Download plans for time machine. Get mother to drive you to Radioshack. Buy the following in large quantities: capacitors, resistors, inductors, circuit boards, hex-inverted Schmidt triggers. Go home. Have another Jolt. Warm up your soldering iron and begin laying out the pieces. Start attaching them to the circuit board. Work quickly, but adeptly, on a software interface. Jump a few small things–a pencil, a toaster, your cat–five minutes into the future to make sure everything is working properly. Go downstairs to dinner because your mother is yelling again. Come back upstairs. Clear out the middle of your room. Attach a note to the door that says, “Not missing. Will return on Sunday. Please keep floor clear.” Start charging the capacitors. Drink one last Jolt. Set the software interface to jump you to the start of next week. Have it wait thirty seconds before activating the machine. Stand in the middle of your room and wait for the blinding flash.

Rinse.

I drove block three today. (Worst introduction ever.–Ed.) During the 1100h. class change, a number of idiotic dumbshits decided that they would try to jump on the back doors of the bus. This, for those of you who don’t know, is a big no-no. It’s dangerous, and it will get you a sizable fine if you do it on a bus you have to actually pay for.

The standard solution to this problem is for the bus driver to yell out, “Don’t get on the back doors!” Usually a few people will snicker, and everyone else will get on the front like they’re supposed to.

Not today. Not only do I have to deal with three separate people who do this at the same stop, one of them gets on the front of the bus even though I said there was no more room. He pushed himself back behind the line and I stopped caring.

When he gets off, though, he tells me that, “Just because you wear that blue jacket doesn’t mean you have the right to yell at people.” So I said,

“You’re right. But my Irish walking hat does.”

“And just because you’re wearing an ugly grey sweatsuit doesn’t give you the right to ignore the rules.”

“I’m sorry that your head is a such a desolate, fucked-up place.”

“And you just cost me eight-thousand dollars. What are you going to do about it . . . asshole?”

“Frat-tastic!”

“No, it gives me the right to enforce the rules and Federal law on this bus. If you disobey the rules, like getting on the back doors or not staying behind the line, I can kick you off. I wanted to kick your dumb, ‘I’m above everyone’ ass off my bus, but instead I decided to let you ride. You don’t like it? Don’t ride the bus again. I’m sure we’ll miss your superior intellectualism, impeccable logic and dry wit, but somehow, eventually, we’ll get by. . . asshole.”

“Are you on the crack? Of course I can yell!”

“I WASN’T YELLING. I JUST HAVE TROUBLE MODULATING THE VOLUME AND TONE OF MY VOICE.”

“I fucking! unfortunately have donkey-raping shit eater tourettes.”

“Always fucking naysaying! Why don’t you invent something like inward singing? Fuck you! Fucking…cockass!”

“Can I see your CDL? No? Well, then here, take these two transfer tickets. The next bus to Shut-the-hell-up street will be by in three minutes.”

“I didn’t watch my buddies die face down in the muck so that you can–sorry, I thought I was John Goodman for a minute there.”

“[Obligatory Big Lebowski quote goes here]. . . . Asshole.”

“Does she dress like a tart?” (Dude, no one’s going to get that. We shouldn’t use it. By the way, this whole idea is terrible.–Ed.)

“You ever get the feeling that Ari Fleischer is a total douche?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see what my Glock has to say about that, shall we? What’s that, Glock, you say shoot ‘im? Okay. Wahoowa, mothuhfucker!”

“No, but I do have the right to make sure that I get my ungrateful, full-of-themselves passengers to class and back on time, safely, and without incident. The only reason I yell is because otherwise people won’t hear me. Imagine if everyone was like you: trying to get on the back doors, talking smack to the drivers, ignoring safety rules that are there for a fucking reason, let me tell you, this isn’t the sort of shit that Congress just passes for shits and giggles, there were a lot of accidents back in the day. But I’ll tell you what: next time you ride, I won’t enforce the rules, and when we crash, I hope the last thing you see is your hands holding your own steaming entrails. Good day.”

“Have a good day, sir. Thanks for riding UTS.”