1. Wake up. Optional.
2. Get dressed. Optional.
3. Coffee.
4. Grunt at family and confirm that elderly cat still alive.
5. News
6. Coffee and amphetamines and Xanax.
7. Eat breakfast. Or not. But probably. Most important meal of the day.
(Insert random semi-structured intervals throughout day of child-centered madness and your inability to teach them anything because you can't even understand how they do division these days or what, exactly, the hell is an adverb again and how long, really, does it take this kid to read a paragraph and thanking the heavens above for your wife who is the brains and backbone of this operation and will certainly get us through the apocalypse.)
8. Coffee.
9. Stare at work computer screen for a while (without checking email because we know what happens then) and think about all the things I really should be doing. Like: designing ventilators in my garage, spending more time with my kids, trailblazing innovative approaches to vaccine production, dismantling the patriarchy, fabricating an entirely new career from scratch because I am not sure I will ever have a job again and am not qualified for any real jobs, quit sniffing glue, restructuring approaches to national healthcare, attacking income and racial inequalities head on, getting that weird bump on my back looked at, disrupting educational paradigms by designing an entirely new national curriculum and forcing Texas to just deal with it, working on my relationship, getting a responsible non-scumbag elected president, and finally dealing with global warming once and for all.
10. Do Facebook for a few hours instead.
11. Coffee.
(Insert really long, semi-manic, rambling FB posts at random points throughout the day, but usually before 2PM. This one counts.)
12. Coffee.
13. 20-30 minutes of actual work, what little you have left, following 2 hr anxiety attack about same.
(insert various randomly spaced medical, uh, "infusions" throughout day to help deal)
14. Think wistfully about last cup of coffee you had.
15. Remember that you forgot lunch right before having dinner (see item 6 plus infusions).
16. Remember all the shit you were supposed to think about doing earlier but didn't (see infusions).
17. As it is getting dark, think about what you should have worked on outside.
18. Go to bed for a while and ponder your mortality and what has become of you and your role in the world.
19. Get out of bed for dinner.
20. Kid bed time! (Alternatively: Yay, NyQuil Time!)
21. Spend 20 minutes "cleaning studio."
22. TV Time!
23. Bed Time! Where you spend an inordinate amount of time considering points 1-24 of the day and question all your decisions and vow to use your privilege do better the next day before falling asleep in a cloud of drug induced bliss and fear induced anxiety.
24. Get up and pee. Dammit.
25. Go back to bed.
26. Start all over again.
Pete Mauney is a Tivoli-based photographer who can be found on Instagram at Instagram @pete_mauney.
