Duplex

by Mike Nagel

What floats my boat is not leaving my house for days on end while polishing off a liter or two of vodka and not reading any of the books I've promised myself I’ll read before I die.

I stay home from work so I can focus on drinking, binge-watching a show starring Giovanni Ribisi, and arranging my books into various piles around the living room.

I heard once that if you know what time the liquor store closes you're a person who likes to drink, but if you know what time the liquor store opens you're an alcoholic. After I heard that, I was very careful to not find out what time the liquor store opens.

There is, of course, no such thing as the foreseeable future.

We're laying in bed, a little buzzed but nothing crazy, nothing nutso, nothing we're going to regret too bad the next morning. J's playing a game on Nintendo called Animal Crossing. You make a new home for a bunch of animals on an island. They walk around like people and have these huge heads. They speak this gobbledygook language that sounds like a dial up modem on helium. I've been watching her play it for hours and there doesn't seem to be a point to any of it.

I wake up slightly hungover but not bad. There are many types of hangovers. I don't mind telling you that I am something of an expert on each and every one of them. This is the one that feels like you're a tuning fork vibrating at 256hz. A hangover that lives mainly in the teeth and bones. I eat some leftover cauliflower-crust margherita pizza and drink some cold lime-flavored Topo Chico and pull my beanie down low onto my head. None of it helps, of course, but it still feels nice to take care of myself like this.

The only real cure I know for a hangover is to start drinking again as soon as possible, but that's a dangerous remedy. I should know. I once spent years curing and creating hangovers that way, a mobius strip of pain and pain-relief, one becoming the other, back and forth, until it was a little hard to remember which one was causing which.

I've heard that many talented deep-sea divers have lost their lives thinking they were swimming toward the surface when really they...

It's always nice to be reminded that we are special, one-of-a-kind people who are never going to die.

No matter how many things we bring over there are always a few more things to bring over. An asymptotic exit strategy. Always leaving but never really gone. At night we sit on the patio of the duplex and drink wine out of a box.