laughter, restrained

clock to wake up at nine am is a sign of depression. So, I picked up this plastic analog alarm clock and felt it go silent in my grasp. I dropped it, falling fastly back asleep. When I woke up in the afternoon to prepare for another night of kevlar wrist guards and scheduled stretch breaks, I found the clock. I had to look closer. There were three marks, dents, melted spots where my fingers had held it. This was during the hot-flash-year. The clock was dead. Completely non-functional.

We dug a trench from below the bathroom window, out into the yard. The intention was to construction a gray-water pit and reroute all the non-sewage plumbing into it, possibly into the bay, which was downhill from the house. The trench was four feet deep and about fifty feet long. I conscripted my friends into the digging. At night when we would party outdoors, drunken revelers would often disappear into the yard, swallowed by the grass in silhouette of the flames of our inevitable burn pile. An ex-girlfriend and I put on boxing gloves one night and fought each other in, around, and over the trench. She uppercut me and I flew backwards into the hole in the Earth. The neighbors were unimpressed.

There is a tension between the idea of un-housed and the places I stayed. There is a tension between the idea of unemployed and the jobs I worked. Nowhere was there any sense of safety or consistency. I resented the people I saw around me who appeared swaddled in their lives. How thin a veneer of living separated them from me. How their laughter, restrained and