The Construction Curse

"The world is a vampire, and I'm dying of thirst."

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

"It's not dumb. Think about it. What do we do? We make art, right? We create things like movies, music, books, whatever. Then what happens? We release them into this big scary world full of people who want to silence us, take our ideas and use them for their own gain. We're all just vampires trying to keep our creations safe from these other vampires that want to steal them so they can profit off our hard work while we get nothing in return."

"I don't know how you think that's true."

"You don't have to agree with me. Just think about it."

"Well if you don't want me to think about it, then maybe you shouldn't be saying stupid shit like that in front of me," she said angrily. "It's getting late. You should probably go to bed."

"I can't sleep tonight. I'll never be able to sleep again with that droning noise out there," I told her as I walked over to the window and opened the curtains. "Oh no." The construction workers had arrived at an ungodly hour this morning and now their lights were illuminating the night sky so that they could continue their work tomorrow at daybreak. There was no way I would be able to get any more sleep tonight. All I could do was watch the steady stream of headlights disappear around the corner and vanish into the distance. "Fuck!" I slammed my hands against the wall next to her headboard and kicked a pile of clothes on the floor, hoping that some of my rage would leak out through my shoes and stain the carpet with enough spittle to stain the carpet with enough spittle to make up for my utter lack of participation in housework and child-rearing responsibilities. "We should have just moved."

"But we didn't," she said as she lay down on her side with her eyes closed and stuck in a middle finger at me by pretending not to hear me anymore. "We already paid for this house. It doesn't matter if someone else bought it from underneath us or whatever if we moved somewhere else now. It's ours now no matter what happens out there." She turned away from me and started making soft snoring noises but only after taking a deep breath first so that I would know she wasn't really asleep yet so that I would know she was smart enough not to get sucked into one of my long-winded rants about existential crisis bullshit again; which she hated because she was sick of hearing about them all the time which is why she chose never talk about them whenever possible unless absolutely necessary which obviously tonight it wasn't because I was too worked up over this fucking construction site outside our house distracting me from sleeping so now here we are talking about something very serious like icky feelings instead of pretending like everything is okay when clearly it isn't okay at all because look who we are dealing with here: a person whose sense of responsibility is so low that he once spent an entire morning searching for half-eaten cans of tuna fish so that he could return them for money back on his groceries instead of actually doing anything worthwhile with his life like washing his own dishes or raising our kid or looking for a new job or even just having sex with his wife instead of being lazy as fuck all day long! So yeah sometimes pretending things aren't okay becomes necessary even if there's someone right in front of you ignoring your repeated requests for attention because honestly there are times when honesty hurts too much so you have no choice but to pretend like everything is okay until you are ready to face reality without crying or hyperventilating or throwing your phone across the room in anger! So thank you for understanding! Now please go back to pretending like nothing bad is happening! Good girl! *END TRANSMISSION*