April is the ____est Month April is the _____est Month
A DrunkVampire Hunter Story everything loose, tight, I suddenly become aware that I am leaning over my desk. And on my
desk is a note, written on my letterhead (yes,Virginia, I have letterhead.When you’re in a
niche industry, it’s the little touches that keep clients from fingering you to the IRS, which is
by the way POINTLESS, as I’ve paid all my taxes, you bastards! Go ahead, audit me! I dare
you!), clean and white against the matte black pad. It says:
By Andrew Patrick
woke up and I hurt a vodka hurt.You know the kind: it doesn’t scream at you like red wine
and you don’t spend all morning on the toilet like with whiskey.You just feel sort of tired
and vaguely disinterested in whatever day this turns out to be. It’s less physical than the kind
of ennui that plagues grad students and cancer patients. All very “I’m struggling, but no one
sees it, and no one not in it even gets it, so why….?”That kind of hell-hole.
I
But this was fine, because I woke up in my office. Always preferable to some graveyard out of
a bad 70’s horror movie or someplace completely unexpected, like a nursery school or a
Starbucks. Both of which I’ve woken up in, with little to no memory of why I was there. Ever
envy theWalk of Shame crowd, because at least they know what mortification they’ve inflicted
upon their souls? Of course you haven’t, because you have your life together.
By the way, getting a coffee out of the morning shift at a Starbucks when they’ve found you
asleep in the food display is way harder than it needs to be. Like, I get that your Gender Studies
Bachelor’s with a Comparative Therapy minor didn’t pan out the way you wanted it too, but
that’s no reason to take out your daddy/Marx issues out on me. All appearances aside, I work
for a living.
Anyway, I woke up in my office. Underneath my desk. Which is good, because I’ve got a
sleeping bag stowed to one side for just such happenstances as these. And I was sleeping on it,
so that’s something. I must have planned ahead.
I feel okay. Not great, not zipped-doo-dah, but okay. I have no injuries, no bruises, no
handcuffs. Obviously I gave better than I got. I begin to think of normal human things, like
breakfast and coffee, and my stomach doesn’t demand to know what the hell I think I’m doing,
so obviously I’m on the right track.You have to listen to your body.
I roll out from under my desk, and then decide I might sit in it. I do this as an experiment
towards my reality. It pays off. I am sitting at my desk. It doesn’t hurt. I feel normal. I am
pleased. I think this whole breakfast thing might work out after all. Stretching doesn’t even
hurt.
Except when I stretch, really get into the stretch, like push it past where it needs to be to that
moment at the far end of the muscular gradient where everything tight becomes loose, and
What means this __________ shepherd to aspire
With such a _________ disposition
To cast up hills against the face of Heaven.
Now, it takes me a minute or two to focus in on it. Because, why would there be a quotation
from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 on my desk?Why is it in an ornate, curlicue hand,
like you’d see on a wedding invitation? Why are their words removed from it?
It’s that last fact that ruins my mood.The other two are random enough to have multiplicities
of explanations, which a man can ponder while a Bacon, Gouda and Egg Sandwich fills the
deeply-felt protein need in his body. They are a matter appropriate to philosophy and
nutrition. But the third fact is stubborn, as the underrated Founding Father might have put it,
and the void left by the erasure rather perversely demands my attention. Because someone
removed those words, and someone removed it for a purpose, and chose that as a means of
communicating to me rather than a strait-forward message.
I mean, is this Mad Libs? Am I supposed to fill in the blank, and so derive the message? What
in the red stinking paroxysmal self-overhearing hominy f…
My red light is on.
I blink and refocus, sit carefully.
My red light is on.
It’s not good when my red light is on.
I keep an office underneath that of a tax attorney who I happened to go to high school with.
He was a star athlete, and I was a wannabe Goth, so we didn’t interact a whole lot, but since
this isn’t a John Hughes movie he never shoved me into lockers or threw stuff at the back of