Our cat, the scientist one that has figured out doors, woke me at 3 because he wanted out so I felt my way downstairs in the dark and unlocked the front door as quietly as I could but the lock still made the loud click it always makes and when the cat got out it realized that out wasn’t where it wanted to be, in was where it wanted to be because it was cold, and snowing or raining or snowing and raining and also I am perhaps partly to blame because I gave him a choice. I stood there for a couple seconds with the door open, looking at him on the doormat and actually asked him, “are you sure about this?” and he came back inside. He followed me back upstairs and slept on the bed, at the foot of the mattress while I lay there and stared at the ceiling and at the dresser until about 4 when I reset my alarm clock to 6 from 5 because I was going to need the extra hour of sleep seeing as how I wasn’t falling right back to sleep and my morning journal writing could just wait until another morning. At this time the cat knocked something off a night stand, or was about to, which is his way of letting you know he wants out, if the bedroom door happens to be open and he can’t wake you by scratching on it. I think I let him out at that point, but my wife may have.
I must have finally fallen asleep around one minute to six because the alarm woke me just as I was getting into a dream about driving on icy streets in the darkest of nights. It was just as well. It was one of those dreams where you go, duh, how about encoding things a little more next time. Where, if you read it in a work of fiction you would mentally chastize the author for not trying harder or for being so obvious.
All that was missing were colored blocks falling from the sky, eternally, clogging everything up.
So I felt my way back downstairs in the darkness and made coffee. Both cats were back inside, so I guess my wife let scientist cat back in soon after one of us let him out. I fed the cats. I ate muesli. I drank a cup of coffee while checking my email. I vaguely remembered another dream, where someone told me something, gave me an idea, suggested something and I thought, Hey, that would be a perfect project for evco in 2007.
I can’t remember what it was, though. It may have involved volatile substances and my place of employment so, ehn.
Then I showered, shaved and got dressed. Before getting dressed I also dried my hair and spent a minute applying some sort of hair product to it in an attempt to get it to behave the way it behaves for my hair stylist. Then I gave up on that. I sprayed deodorant from an aerosol can into my left armpit. Then, still using my right hand, I sprayed it into my right armpit. To do this, I had to hold the can upside down.
Held upside down, mostly just propellant comes out. Back in the days of freon propellant, you could freeze flies by doing that. Did you know that? It reminded me of my job in a photo shop when I was in highschool, lining up rows of frozen flies along the counter on slow days, mentally betting on which would thaw out and fly away first.
I wondered if any scientific papers had been written on the relative incidence of armpit conditions in left and right armpits, whether there was a significant difference and whether they had concluded holding the aerosol deodorant can right side up vs upside down were a contributing factor.
Here’s the best part: I thought all this in a split second. The human brain is a marvel.

Then I went upstairs and got dressed, as quietly as possible, and put on my shoes and drove to work.
The roads were wet, but not icy. Because they were wet, the windshield was soon opaque with road grime, but I had to ration my windshield cleaning fluid because I wasn’t sure how much was left.
So I only cleaned the windshield when it was absolutely necessary. Sometimes I got lucky and a truck would splash my car a little and I could use that water to clean the windshield.
The radio was all blahblahblah so I turned it off and sang the usual songs.
I was the first one at the office so I took the best parking space. Normally I park a few spaces back to make the higher-ups happy or whatever. But today I figured, it’s the last working day in the year. Fuck them.