Hooray for the weekend.

For me, they always begin on Thursday.

Not that it matters what day of the week it is anymore. I’m retired. I sit on benches. I watch the birds fly by. I listen to children for very short stretches of time before I shut my windows and complain. “Fucking jackals.” I say this to no one. “Fucking jackals,” is heard by exactly one human being. This is I.

Tomorrow is Thursday. As I have said, this is when the weekends start, for me.

Hooray.

Tomorrow is also a day that I have chosen to work on my thrilling epic, “Phantom Limb in Limbo”. Please do not steal this title. I came up with it before I fell asleep one night two months ago. I haven’t done anything with it yet. I will tomorrow. I’ve been thinking about what this essay will be about for a long time. I have concluded that it will be thrilling.

The first line is this: “I was having trouble suppressing my phantom erection.”

The second line goes like this: “But I wasn’t about to ask anyone for help.”

I might change this around some. I guess you’ll find out at some point this weekend. Actually: the accuracy of the previous sentence depends wholly on when your weekend starts. For me, they always begin on Thursday.

Let’s switch gears, because I feel like it. This is about another night, but it didn’t happen a few months ago. It is the night that happened last night.

I was trapped in a fever dream. My cat-roommates have evolved (I think we can use this word) to the point where they scare me. Maybe the correct thing to say is that they are slowly revealing their true, once-hidden intelligence, which is quite refined and seldom ceases to impress. Anyway, I was in the middle of a fever dream when the doorknob rattled.

My fever dream was colorful and made of liquid and lights. I may have drooled. The doorknob rattled and shook like an old coffee can full of carpet tacks. I snapped out of it. The colors blurred and smeared my vision, which had been nothing. The lights were off. A strange, unnatural light shone through my window. My bones had to defrost before I could move them.

I opened the door, because the cats had hit a roadblock: they were too short to make a full turn of the knob. Shucks. When the obstacle that had stood in their way swung open, they rushed in and chirped and rumbled their little throats. This was an indication of early morning hunger.

“Please, can’t you see I’m tired? I’m so tired. I just had a fever dream and I’m not sure who you two are. Who are you? Please, let me sleep. Can’t you see I’m tired?”

Their tails were pointed upward like little bayonets, swishing and swooping at thin air. Little tummies ached for canned food.

There are several words I can use to arouse their attention. They associate these words with the sloppy stuff I put in their little bowls.

Here:

1) food

2) good (because it sounds like food)

3) kitties

4) hungry

5) eat

They’re very intelligent.

Coming down off of a fever dream, I had forgotten this. “No food, you two. No food. Can’t you see I’m tired? I’ve been tired all week.”

All they heard was this: “__ FOOD, ___ _____. __ FOOD __ __ ____ __ ___? ___ ___ ____ __ __.”

And they meowed and meowed. I’d never heard so much meowing. I told them to stop, please, let me sleep. Can’t you see I’m tired?

But they insisted. And so I fed them. It took me a long time to get from bed to kitchen, kept having flashbacks of colors and liquid and light. I went back to sleep. In this brief duration, I received several telephone calls from various places that give me money for doing very little. On the other side of the moon, people were repeating a not-so-important event ad nauseum. It got to the point where it had been said so many times in the previous forty-eight hours that I felt like vomiting. Other people were making jokes about a dead celebrity. Sometimes these two things met and even more jokes were made to commemorate the very idea.

“Tomorrow—” I thought. “Tomorrow is when the weekend begins.”

For me, they always begin on Thursday.