Wordsmoker

Life sucks, and will continue to suck, until I die. It’s happy thoughts like this that fill my mind soon after I awaken from yet another night of not sleeping very well. I pull on my clothes – which also suck – and stumble to the kitchen to make some tea. Tea – I think – is about the only thing that doesn’t suck these days.

Early morning – or morning – or early afternoon – whenever it is my Dali-esque body clock deems to drag me from blissful unconsciousness – follows the same routine. Wake up, clothes, tea, cigarette, check the web. I’m comforted by the fact that everything I see and read also sucks. I sip my tea and inhale my cigarette.

It’s been a pretty awful Summer here, even by Scottish standards. You – wherever you are – may have been basking or complaining about heat-waves so hot that buildings literally melted and had to be scooped up into lead containers so they can be flash-frozen into easily-recognizable architectural forms, but over here rain has been holding sway, with considerable panache. Vertical rain, horizontal rain, upwards rain – I’ve seen every rain-variant over the past month or so, apart from Purple Rain which is a motion picture and not a actual meteorological event.

Because of all this rain, it’s been pretty dull, too.

Well, the scene is set. I’m not long awake, it’s raining outside, and I’m drinking my first cup of tea and smoking probably my second cigarette, and I’m looking at things on the internet that suck, which they all do. I’m sitting there, looking at all the suckage on show, and start shivering. It hasn’t been cold by anyone’s imagination, but there’s a breeze building and the promise of some exciting geometrically puzzling rain, so I decide to stumble from my desk chair to put on my favorite hoodie. Because of the shivering.

Hoodie on, I stumble back to my desk and re-seat my depressed self in front of all the suckage. Click, click meh, click that sucks, meh – the usual morning routine. I stub out my cigarette (not on my hand – I’m not that depressed, yet) and then give out a nice, smoky cough.

A moth the size of a fat bee launches itself from the front of my hoodie.

I’m okay with moths. The little ones, I mean. I tend to capture them in my gentle hands and put them out the nearest window. But the big ones – the ones the size of bees, or tiny bats – they freak me out. And lo, I watch in amazement as what appears to be an undercover sparrow flutters from the front of my hoodie, spins by my head and flies in a somewhat direction-less manner towards the open door.

Several things go through my mind.

One – my hoodie is dark blue, and the fat bee moth is black, so I actually put on the hoodie with the fat bee moth clinging to the front. I put on the hoodie, zipped it up to my sad chin, walked back to my desk, sat down, smoked, sipped my tea. All the while this fucker’s been clinging to me like a furry baby born of nightmares. Two – it was only my cough that either awoke it, or dislodged it enough for it to fly away. If I hadn’t had coughed, it could’ve or possibly would’ve still be clinging to me, perhaps just biding its time until it felt like flying up and into my stupid face and making me scream like a tween at a Justin Bieber concert. Three – the fat bee moth may have been anti-smoking.

As these several things go through my mind, and as I sat looking down at the front of my hoodie with these several things going through my mind, I lose track of the flight path of the fat bee moth. By spending precious seconds looking down at my hoodie – as if I was ready to blame it for harboring fat bee moths on purpose – the actual fat bee moth has disappeared. I stand up and start wandering the house. No sign of the actual fat bee moth. It has gone.

And through this chain of events, my face remains the same. Impassive, unshaven, lifeless. Not even a hoodie which harbors anti-smoking fat bee moths can shake me up.

I go back to everything sucking, and think about another cup of tea.