I am sitting at my desk with a laptop that is not mine, unable to access my email account or even open Microsoft Word, trying to explain to my boss why I have not written a piece that I hoped would be ready by now. (I am also thinking ahead to a glorious future when I can log into Gmail and explain to multiple freelance editors what my status is: S.L., M.S., B.M., I am okay and will be in touch after the weekend.) I barely understand how I managed to get into the back end of this website. My hair is unwashed and I have only eight cigarettes left in this pack, which is the last one left from the carton. I have not eaten breakfast. The headphones I am using to listen to Neil Young via YouTube have a short in them—I cannot move my head without "Long May You Run" cutting out. Glancing down at the ancient Nirvana t-shirt I have on, I am reminded of the fact that I am only a year younger than Cobain was when he died and already a year older than Keats lived to be. There are any number of reasons a writer might not file a piece he has promised. The most common one—would 90 percent of cases be putting the figure too high?—is sloth, a vice that, in the beautiful words of Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, "is not only an obstacle on our way to perfection, but it delivers us over to the enemies of our salvation." As it happens, I struggle a great deal with sloth; indeed, it is my besetting sin. But today I would like to lay the blame at the feet of others. Which others? To start with, German cockroaches, who invaded our kitchen two months ago. Also a broken air conditioner, and the EPA, who banned the type of unit installed in our place, and the people at my condo association who initially ruled against our using a window AC unit while we wait for the contractors to rip apart our ceiling and install a six-foot-tall custom heating and cooling unit in the closet where all my jackets go and where we keep everything from my wife's sewing equipment to a 1900 Macmillan set of the Works of Walter Pater whose uncut pages I am too lazy to take a knife or old debit card to—where are all these things going to go, I wonder? Our basement storage unit is full of old issues of First Things, The New Criterion, The Spectator, The Weekly Standard, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, The American Spectator. What little room is not given over to these is reserved for Christmas decorations, my wife's broken bicycle, and six boxes of books belonging to my daughter's godfather. He has been ill lately, and I was very put out a few weeks back when I realized that the day I had chosen to drive down to see him the hospital was the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day—too many cars on the road. Which brings us to traffic. The D.C. metro has been a shambles at least since the Silver Line went in, taking trains away from the Blue, which lower-middle-class people with jobs actually use, and sending them back and forth from Reston at the service of about five or six defense contractors who have time on their hands and the money to afford cabs. This means that most of the time I would be better off going back and forth by car. My wife and I only have one and because we have an infant daughter—to say nothing of the fact that I haven't bothered to sign up for a Virginia driver's license yet—and another baby on the way, it needs to stay with her. We are lucky even to have this one, a 2003 Chevy Tracker that reeks because the previous owner smoked in it with the windows up (I always roll them down): last fall, when our daughter was only a month old, a stupid woman totaled our orange 2004 Pontiac Vibe, an ugly but very efficient car of which I was very fond. (I once considered living in it.) Her insurance stonewalled us for over a month, during which time I was forced to walk from Belle Haven up the George Washington Parkway to Rosslyn. This was very good for my health, of course, and if the situation had persisted indefinitely I might be back to weighing what I did in 2013, when I lived in intern housing at the Heritage Foundation and had no money. Rent for five months had to be paid in advance out of what I had been eking out as a freelancer, substitute teacher, and plasma "donor" in the wilds of Michigan in the seven months following my graduation. (My original plan was to take a position I had obtained with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program—$40,000 and minimal living expenses teaching English to middle-schoolers somewhere near Lake Biwa—in order to fund a law degree, but I had met my wife by then and didn't think she would enjoying having me on the other side of the world for two or three years.) One of the magazines I was writing for at the time was very slow about paying contributors. Another one had the misfortune of being Australian, a contingency whose unforeseen implications included the time when a teller at the Wells Fargo branch on Pennsylvania Avenue deposited it for $200 instead of $200 Australian, a difference of $10 that took four days to resolve; the same thing happened with checks made out in pounds from an English quarterly for which I used to be a columnist. In those days I would walk from Massachusetts Avenue to M Street in Georgetown and walk across the Key Bridge to the office where I was doing my internship; there I would eat whatever snacks were in the kitchen, which allowed me to save enough money to keep up my pack a day habit—this worked very nicely until the man in charge of things on the business end decided to save money by getting rid of snacks. When I got home in the evenings I would have a $2 beer—the cheapest in Washington, I think—at the pizza place next door because alcohol was banned from the apartments and eat rice from a five-pound bag. (The above assumes, of course, that things were going well, that I had been paid or sold one of my review copies—or one of the unwanted books on the review cart in the office—or gotten a refund check from Metro after one of the terminals stole $5 from me: when things were bad I would go three days without eating at a time and make three cups of coffee in the Keurig at the office before leaving at night and put it in a water bottle for the next morning—it was only once, when a freelance check came two weeks late I found myself without tobacco for the fifth day in a row, that it became obvious that something was wrong: a colleague asked me bluntly whether I was okay and forced into my wallet a $100 bill, which I gave back to him the next day when, mirabile dictu, the check came.) Where were we? Oh, that's right. I dropped my laptop yesterday morning: when I turn it on a green and purple psychedelic swirl obscures everything in the middle third of the screen, which makes it impossible to write. I used to have another laptop, but my wife spilled coffee on it when she lurched forward to prevent our daughter from smashing her iPhone (it would have been the second one she's destroyed in five months). Our office manager says that the Apple Store will not be able to fix it until Monday at the earliest. Last night during a thunderstorm the power went out at our place, which meant that I could not even listen to the Roger Clinton tape I was supposed to be writing about even if I had determined to finish the piece by hand. Now I am using an extra laptop, but I don't remember any of my passwords and for some reason Gmail won't send a verification code to my phone, which is only 10 percent charged. (My charger is at home.) Thank goodness I don't need my password for Twitter, from which I have taken a leave of absence. There are at least three pieces I was hoping to work on this weekend, to say nothing of the much-delayed sample chapter for a book I am in the middle of proposing, one that probably won't make me any money. My daughter is in a bad mood because her white noise machine wasn't on last night and her morning nap was interrupted by the men building their permanent monument to modern efficiency in the field of heating and cooling (I think my landlord is getting a tax break for it) in the living room closet. I am hungry right now, but I am no longer a vegetarian and it is a Friday, so I'd like to track down some fish or tofu, but there is nothing in Rosslyn except pizza places and (any other day) wonderful halal trucks. I also need to buy more cigarettes, which means I have to go to the Rite Aid in the Metro station because the CVS downstairs doesn't sell any tobacco products. (They even keep lighters behind the counter.) I also need to shave and to get a haircut and to pick up the dry cleaning. I left my copy of Knowles’s Monastic Order in England on the coffee table. At least there is an office happy hour later today.
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