Homer's Hardware Chapter one

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Hello out there folks. As I have promised some of you I've decided to publish the story I'm writing on this site as it is easy to access. If you think anyone would be interested in it, or enjoy it, pass it along. I will release the story in serials as I write it, so your feed back is much appericiated... It may just keep me writing 😉. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real life events, blah, blah'blah. So, with out further ado... adieu...adu... ad... whatever, I'll just get on with it.
Homer’s Hardware
A Novel in parts
By Brendan Smith

1. Every Fucking Day

Waking is always painful. The alarm blares its piercing racket through the static filled radio station it is set to. The time reads 3:51 am; this is my personal time, set fifteen minutes ahead in order to scare myself into believing I’ve woken late so I’ll get my ass in gear. The trick often fails and I concede to exhaustion, slamming the over used snooze button to gain an extra ten minutes of peaceful bliss.
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After my ten-minute-snooze the alarm sounds its horrendous racket again. As I crawl from my bed every sinew of my body aches. My knees pop, my back cracks, my shoulders creak and my cock throbs with a slowly shriveling morning erection. I call my pooch from the bed, but she simply raises her head and looks at me as though I were insane. I must be insane. Who fucking wakes up this early? Paperboys, me and a handful of other suckers. Oh yeah, and those healthy asshole who do it by choice so they can enjoy a run in the morning calm, or whatever. I stand amongst a pile of yesterday’s soiled clothes and stare at my bed with longing. Fuck, it’s going to be a long time before I see that pillow again. My head begins to throb with exhaustion and I take to the stairs to make for the shower. I stop in the kitchen to plow through a bowl of cereal and start some coffee. I glance at the clock and realize that I’ve lost time. Fifteen minutes never fail to escape me between my bedroom and the kitchen. I should probably contact Stephen Hawkins and have him investigate the possibility of a wormhole located in my stairwell between 3:40 and 4am. I’m sure he’d be interested. So because of the wormhole, time warp thing in my stairwell (or perhaps I sleep on my feet after I get out of bed) I’ve got to shower with lightening speed in order to catch my ride. As I make for the shower, my dog yips at the door. She will not wait for my shower; she’ll piss and shit all over the floor to spite me. I realize this morning, as I do every morning, that I should have dragged the bitch from bed by the collar and thrown her out the door while I had my cereal. Oh well, I’ll probably forget tomorrow. I scramble down the stairs to let the dog out and watch her plod around the backyard sniffing her own turds until the transaction is complete. I have lost another five minutes and the pressure in my bladder is becoming pain. I tear up the stairs and turn on the shower, nearly pissing on myself at the sound of the rushing water. I void my bladder into the toilet. I have lost another five minutes.
Between the dog and the longest pee in the history of mankind kind (or it is person-kind?) I have left myself eight minutes to shower, get dressed and organize myself for the rest of the day. As a male, this is not necessarily difficult. In fact, I can get ready for a wedding in twelve minutes flat, however I’m not entirely awake, so the process will take longer. I clean the essentials in descending order: head-face (I shave my head so washing both happens at once with a bar of soap), pits, crotch, ass, feet. No time to shave. No time to moisturize. No time to apply a firming, pore reducing aloe peel facial mask with essence of green tea and lemon. I have four minutes to get dressed and get out the door to catch my ride.
I dry myself off as I walk down the stairs, tying the towel around my waist as I reach the kitchen. I slap some Peanut butter between two pieces of bread and bag it. The sandwich goes into a grocery bag, along with two pieces of fruit (whatever’s in the bowl suffices as long as it’s not moldy) and two granola bars. Two minutes and counting.
I sprint down the stairs to my dungeon-basement room. I pull on the shorts I wore two days previous and hope nobody I work with will notice. I indiscriminately grab a collared shirt from my closet (store dress code), glance at the clock, say “ Holy Shit I gotta go,” to the dog, run up the stairs and out my front door.
This is the part of my morning that varies. If I am unlucky, I glimpse the taillights of my ride turning down the end of my street. When this happens I contemplate suicide, think better of it, contemplate going back to bed, think better of it, consider waking my folks to ask for a ride, contemplate suicide at the thought of waking my parents, then decide to be late and ride my bicycle to work (this is not an option in Ottawa in the winter, so I usually wake my folks, then wish I had chosen suicide). If luck is on my side, which it often is (I’m not a careful planner so being on time is lucky), I ride to work in cool convenience with Nate Tucker, the “Inventory Management Associate” for Lumber and Building Materials.
Nate is a nice fellow, a good guy. I have a suspicion, though, that he may be slightly retarded. It’s not that he drives like a maniac. He does but I’m too tired to fear for my life. It’s not that he has no fashion sense. He doesn’t and I don’t care (especially when I look down at myself and I’m wearing blue and red flowered surf shorts, construction boots and a vertical stripped shirt). It’s not that he’s over weight. I could care less what he puts in his body. It’s that he can’t carry a conversation. We ride in silence every morning until I realize I’ve forgotten my coffee (as I do every morning) and ask him to pull over at a gas station so I can get a coffee from some crazy, sleep-deprived bastard who’s finishing the overnight shift. Coffee in hand, I attempt to make small talk with Nate as he navigates the quiet streets of suburbia at a speed that would make most Nascar drivers shit on themselves. This mornings ‘conversation’ goes as follows:
Me: “How’s it going?”
Nate: ”…”
Nate: ”…”
Nate: “Uh, … you know, little tired, you know. Fuckin’ kids were sick and I got this video-editing project I’m doing for my neighbor. I finally got it working around eleven. There was some problem off of it… uh,… with it, …, uh…, some program error…”.
Me: “So you got it working?”
Nate: “…”
Nate: “…”
Nate: ”Yeah. Some problem with a program off of it…, with it…”
Well, you get the picture I’m sure. The conversation is always the same, whether it has to do with his go-karting nephews or some Nascar race, or a tennis match or whatever. Every single word is uttered with so little confidence it sounds like a lie and makes me wondered how he ever got laid enough to have children, let alone married. Every morning I want to grab him by the throat and force him to grow a pair of balls, but I don’t have superpowers and I’m not a doctor. Nate is the kind of person I least want to be like. He has been at Homer’s Hardware store for seven years, having been hired a few months after the place opened. He used to run my department and readily accepted a demotion when his wife got a well paying job. He appears to have no goals and is satisfied with his place in the world. If I’m ever satisfied working at Homer’s I’ll blow my fucking brains out.
This is my routine. Every fucking morning.

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