I am flummoxed by my letter of complaint tonight. (I love the word “flummoxed.” I heard a man use it once, and I immediately incorporated it into my lexicon. I also love the word “lexicon.” I had to look it up first, though. I used to write down the words and definitions I looked up, but I stopped doing that because the words are right there in the dictionary, and I can look at the dictionary anytime I want. It’s harder to keep a record of daily temperatures, because you would have to store a lot of old newspapers in the house, and so I decided it’s best that I focus on that and not the words. That way, I ensure that my data is complete.)
I would like to complain to my father for his rudeness about my credit card bill, but I don’t like to complain to the same person two times in a row. It’s bothersome enough that the complaints themselves don’t follow any particular pattern; I don’t need the added aggravation of bunching up my complaints about one person, not even my father.
I think I will complain to Matthew Sweet. This will require that I start a new green office folder.
Mr. Sweet:
It pains me to have to write this letter to you, as I am very much a fan of your music. However, two things are bothering me.
First, I can’t listen to your music when I am waiting to see my therapist, Dr. Buckley. She prefers quiet, more reflective music, and while it would be unfair to say that you’re not reflective, I don’t think “Sick of Myself” is emblematic of the sort of healing and self-respect that Dr. Buckley strives for in her practice. Perhaps you could consider something more upbeat, should you, yourself, someday feel a little more optimistic about things.
Second, as I’m sure you’re aware, the middle songs on your album Blue Sky on Mars are substandard. From “Hollow,” the fourth song, to “Heaven and Earth,” the eighth, you appear to have accepted half-baked songs. You cheapened your talent and swindled your fans by not insisting on a higher level of performance.
I will say, however, that you acquitted yourself nicely on your next album, In Reverse.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15
When my eyes open, I’m lying on my back. The clock says 7:38 a.m. This is a relief to me, after the waking-time debacle from yesterday. That’s 222 days out of 289 this year (because it’s a leap year) that I’ve stirred at 7:38. There is something in my physiology that favors this time. I do not know what it is. I am not a physiologist.
I reach for my notebook and my pen, flip over to today’s page, and record my wake-up time, and my data is complete.
Today, I am going to paint the garage. I have been in this house that my father bought for eight years (eight years and eighty-eight days). I paint the house and the garage in alternating years. I would prefer to paint them on the same date each year, but weather is too much of a variable.
Technically speaking, I do not need to paint this often. A good paint job, the only kind that is acceptable, can last ten years or more, even in a climate as erratic as Montana’s. Dr. Buckley tells me that I will feel better if I remain as busy as possible, and I have found that physical busywork is more beneficial than mental busywork. For example, I like putting together plastic models of trains and automobiles and such, but often, I will start thinking not of the glue or the paint involved in the model but about something someone has done to irritate me—that someone often being my father—and I end up writing letters of complaint that I am tempted to mail, and this interferes with my project. Dr. Buckley does not want me to mail my letters of complaint. I also like painting the house and the garage, and my mind does not go to other things when I’m doing so because the work is more physically demanding. That’s why, today, I’m going to paint the garage.
But I can’t paint every day. For one thing, paint needs time to dry. For another, Montana’s weather is such that there is precipitation—that’s rain or snow—every single month of the year. Even if paint somehow magically dried (and there is no such thing as magic) two seconds after you applied it, you would still have to deal with rain and snow. Someday, scientists might make super fast–drying paint. Controlling the weather would be much harder, even for scientists.
There is also a third reason, which I don’t want to talk about for very long, as it will make me angry. The third reason is my father. There is no way that my father would buy enough paint for me to paint the house and garage every single day, even if I could. I have to fight with him just to paint every year, and I know he will be mad when he sees that I’ve bought nine gallons of paint for a tiny one-car garage. It wasn’t my fault, though. Home Depot had too many choices, and the paint man was not helpful. I need to write him a letter.
After eating a bowl of corn flakes and taking my eighty milligrams of fluoxetine—and after changing into my painting T-shirt and jeans, which are very ratty and thus are kept deep down in my bottom drawer so I don’t have to see them except when they’re needed—I log on to Montana Personal Connect. eHarmony and its twenty-nine levels of compatibility found no one for me, but there are no levels of compatibility on Montana Personal Connect. You just write a profile and post it and wait to see what happens.
My profile looks like this:
Edward, age 39
Status: Single
Seeking: Dating
Lives: Yes
Location: Billings
Region: US-Mountain
Looks: Average
Hair/eyes: Brown/brown
Body: Average (although I don’t know what average really is)
Height: Tall (although I don’t know what tall really is)
Smoking: No
Drinking: No
Drugs: No
Religion: No. I prefer facts.
Sun sign: Capricorn
Education: High school graduate
Children: No
Career field: Not answered
Politics: Not answered
More about me…
I keep track of the weather and I like to watch Dragnet, but only the 1967–1970 color episodes.
There are no messages waiting for me. Montana Personal Connect seems a lot less scientific than eHarmony, but at least it let me post a profile.
Because I paint the garage so frequently, I need only wash it before painting. When my father bought this house eight years and eighty-eight days ago, the painting on both the house and the garage was in very sorry shape and probably hadn’t been tended to in twenty years. It was so bad that I wanted to write a letter of complaint to the man who sold the house to my father, but my father would not give me his address. That frustrated me.