Sunday Morning Sweeping

My mind has the uncanny ability to conjure up reasons that make little logic, but invariably lead to me doing what it was I wanted to do in the first place, sans the guilt. It tends to focus these efforts on the aforementioned failure at quitting and my morning lie-ins. Some people rise from slumber, fresh-faced, with their hair slicked back, stretching as if they’d swallowed a mattress commercial. I am not one of those people.

If left to my own devices, I sleep at 3am and wake at noon, but, surprisingly, people find business calls past midnight a tad annoying, and so I’m forced to rise before 8. I’ve recently moved to the coast, where rising post-6am is some unspoken crime that lobs you towards the slackers and hippies that roam our shores. As a proud slacker and hippy, I have no qualms freely admitting a 7am wake up (along with the aid of 6 alarms) and so the eerily chipper morning workforce hasn’t yet impeded my routine.

That was until the sweeping…

My alarm starts a full two hours before I plan to rise. Simultaneously, the reasons I should stay in bed longer than planned start to surface.  Now, these reasons are far less logical than the quitting quitting reasons – these require a slumber-ridden, sleepy state that only needs a nod to agree. Stupid reasons, such as, I won’t shower – five more minutes’ sleep. Five minutes later: I won’t have breakfast, I’m not hungry anyway. I can add on another five minutes…. I won’t have coffee and so and so forth, until the reasons become nonsensical, such as, I may miss my webinar, but it would be so unprofessional to yawn mid-speech. I must sleep more.

So, you can see why my subconscious mind would find complaint in being jarred awake by various, unintelligible noises.

It started with the gossip sessions. The infernal landlord leisurely rolls up at 8:45am, whilst his workforce starts at six, resulting in a gossip session under my house. Infernal’s claim to fame is that he owned land at the tender age of 19; to me, this merely highlights the fact that the man doesn’t drink, smoke or swear (the latter not affecting his income, but points to an unfortunate personality type that seems to know better than us vice-ridden felons).

To put this in context: I live in a log cabin by the sea, with 180 degree breaker view… and it’s Hell. Pure Hell. Infernal, himself, obviously missed the dictionary entry of ‘sound-proofing’ and simply plopped a cardboard box on stilts, resulting in the morning’s gossip session under the stilts sounding as if it occurs in my living room. The steel-selling neighbour’s truck routinely reverses through my bedroom and my bathroom routine keeps time for the complex-dwellers.

Each noise raises me further and further from slumber, rendering my excuses moot and the stress of the day ahead more imminent. White, hot rage starts to sink in – with over an hour left to sleep, the cretins invade my privacy. I feel angry. I feel violated. I feel…homicidal. And then the sweeping starts. Why Infernal forces them to sweep the driveway daily is beyond me, as, almost as if by my bedside, the scratching, scouring sound drills through my pillow-covered ears and awakens a new level of fury. The duvet begins to mimic the knot in my chest, as I writhe stretches the mattress-commercials can only dream of. Stretches fail to release the tension and I’m forced to dwell in a murderous rage, fantasizing various ways to bestow justice.

If Infernal had even the slightest inference into the various fantastical circumstances he and the broom share, he would truly treat each day as it if were his last.  The broom has been shoved so far up figurative holes that Infernal has cried sawdust; he has been swatted with the broom, as if a red-headed stepchild (I have no evil stepmother/father, so I do not fall into this category), he has had the broom broken over his cretin-like head and he’s been locked in dark cellars, forced to listen to the nails-on-chalkboard screech of the broom for the rest of eternity.

All this lies dormant in me, as I pass him each morning – smile plastered on my face as if make-up upon a ghostly doll. Perhaps I should send him my medical bills for the ulcer he’s so kindly contributed to.