Copyright © 2021 by Ralph Robert Moore.

Return to lately 2021.

I wake early.

I remember way, way backwards through the turbulent decades to the black and white photographs of my youth under black and white trees, running across black and white grass, when often on a Saturday morning my stupid face wouldn't rise off the softness of my white pillow until eleven a.m., or later.

I always felt so rested!

But the past twenty years or so, I'm up by three or four o'clock in the morning.

If I'm lucky.

Sometimes I'm awake by one. Not unusually, by eleven. It's still the day I fell asleep! What the fuck?

The thing is, when you wake up while the rest of the world is still pushing out breaths between their lips, there's not a whole lot you can do.

It's dark, it's quiet.

I can't turn on the TV, because that would wake Mary.

So I do one of two things.

I stay in bed, under the covers. Reclose my eyes and try to fall back asleep. Which almost never works. While I try to fall back asleep I think of a time in the near future, after a zombie apocalypse, where a ragged group of survivors are trudging down a road out in the middle of nowhere, all of them in dirty clothes, all of them stinking because they haven't washed for months, all of them skinny, the men with full beards, the women with ratty hair, and a vehicle appears behind them, slowly approaching. The raggedy group's leader holding up a knife, swaying. All the others in the group swinging their fearful eyes to this leader, looking to her for direction on how to react to this frightening development.

They've encountered other groups of survivors in the past.

And it's never gone well.

The vehicle gets even closer, and closer.

Brakes.

Voice over a loudspeaker. But quiet enough it's unlikely to be heard by the undead stumbling around in the surrounding woods, banging their foreheads against low tree limbs in a vaudeville way that would have been funny at one time, before all this shit, but is absolutely, absolutely, absolutely no longer humorous.

"Good morning. Would the leader of your group please raise their hand."

All fearful eyes swinging to her.

At what point does someone stop believing in God?

How many disappointments does it take?

And at what point does someone say, I don't know why I'm being put through this, I don't know your plan, but I have kept my faith.

She raises her hand.

"We would like to meet with you. If you are agreeable to that. To sit down with your group over bowls of homemade chicken noodle soup, and buttered biscuits, to discuss your group possibly joining with us. To be a part of something. Are you agreeable to considering that? If you are, please once again raise your hand."

Everyone wants to be a leader. In charge. But unless you've actually been a leader at some point in your life, you have no idea of the burden that carries. The responsibility. The weight. Leaders are rarely happy. They just pretend to be happy.

Her people are dying. Starving to death. This could be a terrible decision. It could be a ploy to steal whatever few pathetic possessions they still own, to rape the females, rape some of the males, which has happened before and before and before.

Homemade chicken noodle soup.

Their bellies are so concave below their rib cages.

Tears streaming down her cheeks.

She raises her hand.

Or I do the second thing.

I rise out of bed.

In the darkness, in the silence.

Both hands out sideways, right hand in this black blindness touching the hardness of the recumbent bicycle's handles, the wall of the short white hallway leading from our bedroom to the kitchen. I navigate my way to the wooden cabinet next to the side-by-side, pull down a tall glass tumbler.

Normally I would just push the height of the glass against the spout spilling down ice cubes, but since it's three in the morning, and the tumbling down is noisy, surprisingly so, I instead swing open the stainless steel door on the freezer side of the side-by-side, lift my fingers up, down into the tall clear plastic tank holding all the ice cubes, scooping out some, dropping them into my glass, holding the glass against the spout that pours down cold filtered water, watching the glass fill at three a.m. Ice cubes rising like jewels up the glass's interior circularity.

And that's my first beverage of the day.

Ice water.

I ascend the stairs at the front of our home to the second story.

At the top of the stairs, off on the right, my study.

Floor to ceiling blonde-wood bookcases against three of the tall walls. Holding the weight of thousands of books. By subject matter, and then alphabetical.

The fourth side of the study, with a desk and my computer, a half wall overlooking the two-story cathedral ceiling living room below.

I light a cigarette. Lift and sip my ice water. Read my emails. Check out any comments I've had on my Facebook page. Click the Amazon KDP stats to find out how many copies of my ten books I've sold overnight. Do a sideways shoulder-shake sitting down dance in my pajamas in celebration of new sales, silly, but still celebratory. People are reading me. All I ever asked for. Go to Google, click on the News app, scroll through what's been going on around our imperfect world while I slept. If it's really early, where it'll be hours before Mary's likely to wake, I'll watch a foreign-language movie on one of the streaming services we subscribe to: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Shudder, Hulu, HBOMax. Mary and I used to watch foreign-language movies together, but since her stroke in 2002, she, one of the most well-read persons I know, can no longer read subtitles (aphasia), so we stick with English-language films only.

Go to YouTube, try to find videos I can use for our latest Rob and Mary videos session later today. Rob and Mary videos are where Mary and I sit side by side at my computer, around six-thirty at night, watch videos I think Mary might like. Fail Army videos, Idiots at Work, Idiots in Cars, Reddit gifs, song videos, Carbonaro magic tricks, animals helping other animals, etc.

While I'm doing all this, Sweet Pea, our one remaining cat, is screeching by my bare feet, whining for food.

The thing is, never, ever feed a cat when it first starts begging for food. Because otherwise, it's going to start begging for food at six a.m., then three a.m., then eleven p.m.

Instead, just ignore its pleadings and feed it each morning at a convenient time for you.

You'll thank me for this.

Around seven, I go downstairs.

A really good time to get a lot of the day's chores out of the way.

Sweet Pea jumping around the flexing tendons of my descending bare feet, whining a meow that sounds a lot like, 'LOL', 'LOL", which is fucking eerie that early in the morning.

Feed her wet cat food from a small can, black plastic fork dropping that glop down into a white Styrofoam bowl.

Check to see if the lights are on in our bedroom. Usually not.

Get Mary's beers for this new day out of the fridge in the garage.

Turn on the lights in the kitchen.

Pull anything from the garage we need to defrost for breakfast. Bacon, bread, ham, English muffins. If we need to microwave red-skinned potatoes for cottage fries, get them rotating.

Empty the dishwasher. Bend over in my pajamas, pull each plate and bowl out of the racks, careful not to let their weights bang against each other, like a bell that could awake my love.

Clean and refill the cat's water bowl, a large, oval green bowl that was used when I ordered red roses to be delivered to Mary's office a couple of decades ago.

Sitting at the black breakfast nook table, sort through the mail, pay any bills that are due.

If the trash can in the kitchen is full, lift it out of its tall rectangular black container, twist its ties on top, haul it out to the garage, drop it in the trash bin. Put a new trash liner in the kitchen's trash container.

Flatten the colorful cardboard packages for the frozen food we ate last night, toss them in the recycle bin.

If it's trash day, Thursday, gather up all the big and small trash bags from the various waste baskets upstairs and downstairs, quietly get a set of clothes and pair of blue sneakers from the bedroom, a brown leather bomber's jacket since it's cold outside now, and mail that needs to go out. Roll up the wide garage door. It's pretty much pitch-black outside. Where we live, mail isn't delivered to each individual home. Instead, it's put into a kiosk about a two-minute brisk walk down the street from our home, a kiosk we share with five other houses. Usually, there's no one else outside at this hour. A few weeks ago, I was walking our mail down to the kiosk, and across the street, suddenly appearing, a large racoon with three smaller racoons behind it. They stopped their race down the street when they became aware of me. Staring at me. I kept walking, and after a moment's hesitation, the large racoon, realizing I meant no harm, continued his or her scamper, the smaller ones keeping up, small claws dashing behind. Slide the envelopes of paid bills into the metal slot at the top left of the pick-up compartment of the kiosk. Unlock the small square door assigned to our home. Pull everything out, careful not to drop anything. Walk back to the open wide door of our garage. Roll the tall trash bin to the sidewalk, positioning it according to the town's waste management specifications. If it's full, do the same with the recycle bin.

Make coffee.

We use French Market coffee, a New Orleans coffee made with chicory to give it a more complex flavor.

Eight heaping tablespoons of coffee, tall as soft dark pyramids, dropped into the filter basket.

Add water to the leftwards tilted carafe maneuvered under the side-by-side's filtered water spout. Carafe filled to the brim.

Right thumb pressing the On button.

And this coffee is my second beverage of the day.

Around eight o'clock I go back into the bedroom.

Walk past the bed in the master bedroom.

To the master bathroom.

Turn on the overhead light in the toilet alcove.

Turn on the overhead light in the large walk-in closet.

At this point, all those lights on, Mary might start stirring.

Or she might not.

If she doesn't, I lower the metal bars on my side of the bed, which prevent me from rolling out of the bed in the middle of the night. Which before the bars happened more than once. Disorienting, to wake up spinning down in the air, hitting my head against the side of the white plastic waste basket, my shoulder on the brown carpet.

And that lowering metallic noise always makes her raise her head off the pillow.

Once Mary's awake, and we're watching the Today Show, a show that used to be great, but is now a shit show, basically a really long commercial for different NBC shows, we get our coffee, sip it, and switch over to Judge Judy, Family Feud. Sometimes, Chopped.

I give Mary her morning pills.

Make breakfast.

Eat it in bed. Because why the fuck would you ever eat sitting at a kitchen table when you can eat lying on your side in bed?

Try to rotate the meats. Bacon and eggs with oat nut toast; sausage patties with cottage fries cooked in the fat from the patties, and eggs; scrambled eggs with cubed ham and rye toast; waffles with maple syrup and bacon; thick ham slice with English muffins with butter and blueberry jam, and eggs; sausage patties with hash browns, and eggs; ham and egg and American cheese sandwiches with potato patties on the side. Every once in a while a breakfast burrito; a BLT; hot dogs; a pork chop or chicken-fried steak with pan gravy, a biscuit, and eggs; a soft chicken taco; a steak and pepper sandwich; fresh nachos; or a Huevos Rancheros, my favorite, two partially overlapping fried corn tortillas, Huevos Ranchero sauce atop, fried eggs over that, grated Mexican cheeses raining down on the tops of the eggs, a plump, juicy medium-rare filet mignon to the side of the plate. Now, that's a good breakfast. Dipping the redness of a cut slice of the ruby filet into that rich, red sauce, that golden, molten egg yolk.

After breakfast, we watch a movie. Usually a horror film, sometimes something else. Just something well-made. Then usually a TV show. Could be an hour-long documentary from Showtime or HBO, could be an episode of Bravo's Below Deck, or The Amazing Race or Survivor.

Up next, in the early afternoon, we continue our rewatch of The Walking Dead.

This is the first time we've revisited the series since first watching it, years ago.

And I'm impressed at how good it is. Better than I remembered. Much grimmer, and more moving, than I had recalled.

We just finished season 6, which overall is very strong, one of the better seasons, and now we're marching on into season 7.

After watching an episode of The Walking Dead, we see the latest episode in our favorite TV shows cycle.

There are 10 shows we rewatch on a regular basis.

Those shows are Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Office (up to where Michael leaves), True Blood, Banshee, Fargo, Quarry, and Mad Men. Given that we watch one episode a day (two episodes of The Office since it's a half hour show), we rewatch each episode about every two years.

Right now, we're in season 2 of The Sopranos.

After we finish watching the latest episode of the Walking Dead, and before we start watching the latest episode of The Sopranos, I get out of bed and walk through the short white hallway connecting the master bedroom to the kitchen, and make an RRM.

An RRM is my third beverage of the day.

And isn't it so pretentious of me that I named a drink after myself?

But we're allowed to be pretentious. We're allowed to do almost anything we want to do.

I love steamed clams. The dark, warm slipperiness across tongue and teeth. (And I love, love, raw oysters. I don't use lemon juice or hot sauce or any other squirt, just tilt their slide between my upturned lips. Love the brininess, love that I'm killing a small live animal in my mouth with each chew of my back molars, savoring that little death.)

Here's how you make an RRM.

Pull down from the wooden cabinet by the stainless steel side-by-side an old-fashioned glass. Fill it halfway up with chilled Clamato. Shake down about a dozen dark dashes of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce. Too many shakes of table salt-about half a dozen. Eight grinds of black peppercorns, to where the red surface is floating like a crowd of empty life jackets with freshly-ground black pepper.

And the most important step.

DO NOT STIR IT.

Sip it tilted sideways.

As your sipping lowers the solution in the glass, the intensity of the settling snakes of Worcestershire, the salt, the pepper, will intensify. Until it's almost too much, and you're down to the dregs.

And that's an RRM.

After we finish our latest rewatch of one of the ten series we repeat, we prepare to go upstairs.

I fix a Manhattan. My fourth beverage of the day.

But actually now, just a whiskey.

A Manhattan is made with a cherry in the bottom of a short glass, ice cubes tumbled atop, whiskey rising up the interior sides of the glass, a splash of dry vermouth, a shake of Angostura bitters.

I did that for years.

In honor of Mary's dad, Joe, who loved Manhattans.

Over the decades, we met up with Joe at different locations across America. In Sacramento, California, where he and his wife Joan were living while he worked as a space engineer for Aerotech. In Florida, while we were travelling across the country, and he was attending a space scientist conference in Miami. We went out to a seafood restaurant after his latest conference, and boy did the seafood suck. Florida has terrible seafood restaurants. Surprisingly.

A few years later we flew from Maine, where we were then living, to meet up with Joe and Joan in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee, where they had retired because Joan still had sisters living there. Ate at a lot of wonderful restaurants in Milwaukee, Joe always ordering a Manhattan to start his meal.

Still later, they drove by car to Maine to visit with us for a week. Maine has absolutely the worst shit restaurants in America, but Joe still managed to get his Manhattans.

Finally, after Joan's death, Joe would fly down to our home in Texas and spend each holiday season with us, and we always made sure we had Manhattan fixings for him.

After he died, found on the kitchen floor by his next door neighbor, I started drinking a Manhattan each day in honor of him. Raising a glass to my wife's father.

We go upstairs each day around 3:30. Come back down to the kitchen around 4:30. Take our latest round of pills, and Mary's eyedrops to control her borderline glaucoma.

She gets a second cold beer. German or Mexican bitter draft. I get a tall tumbler filled with ice cubes, vodka, and Coca-Cola. My fifth beverage of the day.

Start writing stories. Smoking even more cigarettes.

At seven we troop downstairs for the evening. Eat dinner in bed, now often frozen meals, rather than the elaborate preparations of our past. But that's okay. We still have our breakfasts.

Switch back to ice water. The cycle goes on.

Lights out around eight.

Mary falls asleep easily.

I'm glad she does. She deserves her rest.

I think of a time in the near future, after a zombie apocalypse, where a ragged group of survivors are trudging down a road out in the middle of nowhere, all of them in dirty clothes, all of them stinking because they haven't washed for months, all of them skinny, the men with full beards, the women with ratty hair, and a vehicle appears behind them, slowly approaching.