We're Living in Their Spare Time

Friday, Oct. 6
Mike
Freshman, Journalism & Mass Communications
Camden, SC

I’m standing in my boxers and nothing else and listening to WUSC as loud as my radio will allow. On it, a Greenday-ish song I don’t know and don’t hate. I’m playing Tecmo Super Bowl II on my Super Nintendo and drinking my second of Parrish’s Icehouses and eating the last slice of a pizza I picked up from Pizza Hut three hours ago but hadn’t started eating until now. I finish the last slice just as Kerry Collins completes a fourth-quarter touchdown pass to Sam Mills and the song I don’t know but decide I like ends and a similar-sounding song by a band called Less than Jake begins. Still chewing the last slice of pizza, I press the kick-the-extra-point button with one hand and take a drink of my beer with the other. Wait for the game clock to run out, and the score is 28-7, Panthers. I pump my fist once, reverently, to no one but the TV screen. I save my game, flick the controller down on Parrish’s bed, and switch the Super Nintendo and the TV off. Exhale dramatically.

I look at myself in the mirror. Rake my hair down into my face with both hands, over my eyes, before sweeping it all back again. I exhale dramatically. I pace around the room. Sit on my bed and consider my options. I could call Garnett, see if he’s up for dinner at Russell House, see if he’s heard about anything going on at Mad Hatters or McKensie’s tonight. If not, maybe get a beer or two with him at Orlando’s and go back to his room and watch Dazed and Confused again, or maybe Less than Zero, and borrow a few more of his roommate’s CDs. I could go downstairs, play Killer Instinct with those two guys from Barnwell. Jack off to Parrish’s movie he recorded off late-night Cinemax I secretly discovered on a VHS tape cleverly labeled, “The Program.”  I could go to Blatt and work out, run my hand across my abs almost instinctively, decide I don’t really need to. I could call Roxanne and Brenna, realize I don’t have their number. I glance at the clock. 7:25. I could go downstairs, grab a chicken sandwich, hope someone I know is in the cafeteria.

I stand up from my bed. Slouch down in my desk chair, hair flopping back into my eyes, and I shut my eyes tightly, rub them with both hands. I open my eyes and exhale, and when I do, I’m staring at the picture on my desk, the one using the plastic IHOP promo card holder Parrish stole last week as a frame. The one and only picture on my desk. The first picture I unpacked when I moved in. The picture Parrish asked me who the girl in the middle was, and I didn’t have an answer for him. The only picture that, I guess, really matters to me. In a dark bedroom in a beach house at Myrtle Beach. Me and Tim and Danny and Lee and Alexandra, a cigarette dangling from Danny’s mouth, Tim, in a white t-shirt with a lot of clocks on it, from a restaurant in, I think, Virginia. Me, tan, shirtless, in my gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviators and a drunken bad-idea backwards grey beret. Lee is leaning into the shot, her long blond hair lies across one side of my chest, and, looking at the picture, I can actually feel its softness right now. Alex's arm is around my shoulder.

I glance at the clock. 7:27. She’s probably in her room, probably not even getting ready to go out yet.

I could call Alex.

I turn down the radio. I pick up the phone.

No. Not tonight. I hang the phone up. I look back at the picture for a long time before spinning it around so that it’s facing the wall. 

I exhale again, rub my eyes again, mentally note how dramatic I'm being. I stand up, pace the room again. It’s not until I’m flipping though my CDs--looking for something to listen to but not really--that the truth hits me. The truth is not that there is just nothing to do tonight. Well: the truth is that it’s the weekend and there are, in fact, a ton of things I could do. There are an infinite amount of decisions I could make, but the truth is that making those decisions, and even moreso the corresponding actions those decisions would lead to, would require a lot more effort than I’m willing and possibly even able to put in right now, and when not even the beckoning, crispy, buttery goodness of a Bathesda chicken sandwhich can get you up and out of your room, there’s only one thing left for you to do.

I slide into bed and pull the covers up over my shoulders, and all of my anxiety disappears and wave of peace washes over me as I realize I’ve made the right choice. I’m actually not going to miss this Friday night at all, and as I drift off into sleep I decide that life is just one long process of getting tired.