What have I been up to and how do I spend my days, you ask? It’s not worth talking about, but I will.

I get up. I get my son dressed, fed and to the bus stop. If my pathetic digestive system allows me to, I take a poop and play Candy Crush. Shower. Occasionally shave. Occasionally brush my teeth. Trim the nose hairs. Pluck some ear hairs. Apply cover-up makeup to any facial blemishes. Then head to the closet for the moment of truth.

It’s really a 50/50 proposition when I take one of my 4 pairs of pants off the hanger and slide them over my girth whether Mr Button will be able to reach into Mrs Buttonhole. Sometimes it does – sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes (hell, often) it might make it but the spinal pain that follows suggests it shouldn’t stay there. It’s on these I’m-a-bloated-sausage days that I try to figure out what the hell I ate that caused this tubby predicament. I usually come up with an answer (and it’s often ‘poutine’) and then I swear to not do it again. On days (and they’re rare) that the pants should slip on without drama, I do a sign of the cross and carry on.

In the process of carrying on I will encounter the cats and dogs. They invariably want a treat from me. They always get that treat, but it’s never without me also delivering to each of them a rambling monologue filled with racial epithets and harsh criticisms of their innate uselessness and inability to improve my life in any significant or financial way. I suppose in the end we both walk away satisfied. Their stomachs full of modified wheat gluten and me rid of a 1/10th of a percent of pent up rage.

I get into the car and head to work where I spend roughly the amount of time I’d paid for milling about, bouncing back and forth between productive contributions to the daily workload, asking coworkers if they have any candy and hanging out in the washroom looking for a secret lever that will deposit me into a more thrilling existence. Spoiler alert: I’ve never found one. BTW, I am a technical broadcast supervisor. I work on IT and broadcasting projects and equipment. Most friends (Kyle) don’t even know what I do. That’s what I do. Despite what they think, I don’t sit behind a single button and push it at regular intervals for 8 hours. I sit behind many buttons and randomly press them for at most 7 hours. That’s way different.

When my day’s done, I waddle out to the car. Turn the key, hoping my 9-year-old car with 710,000 km’s on it starts up, for as much as I don’t look forward to the drive home, by that point I can’t stand the thought of staying at work any longer. Sometimes I make stops. Today I stopped at the RBC ATM drive-thru where there were 2 cars in front of me. The minivan at the machine was in park, which was upsetting and meant that I sat there for about 10 good minutes. I assume that for the first 8 of those minutes the idiots were wondering which button to push for a Big Mac before it dawned on them that this was a fucking bank. The last 2 minutes were them attempting to withdraw $20 from their account and the last 10 seconds was them realizing they only had $8.51 in said account, the driver blaming this on the passenger who always overspends on frivolous things like cigarettes and diapers for their bastard daughter and then the driver putting the minivan in Drive and moving on.

Yesterday I stopped at the Staples in Burlington to buy some paper. What kind of paper? None of your business. When I checked out, the squishy blonde cashier gave me an extra-spirited and certainly off-script, “Hey, how ya doin’ tonight?” She didn’t have to do it, but it made my purchase of canary yellow and orchid purple ruled refill pads a little more jolly. Oops. Turns out that is your business now.

And then I get home where I often hear of bad things my son has done at school and after school and I then make a beeline for the liquor cabinet and poutine mix. Figure those will make me feel better. They do, until 1 am when I start to regret it and then again at 4 am when the acid reflux kicks in and I really regret it. Up and down 4 times to pee between then and the alarm clock at 7:30 am and then I get up and do it all again. Why? Why, indeed…