3

The Horrible Freedom

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2

The Inhuman Hours

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As an adolescent, in the absence of an enforced schedule, I would play computer until 10 in the morning and sleep until 3 in the afternoon. I was the saddest kind of vampire: eschewing the sun-walkers not in favor of the sweet embrace of the night, but in favor of playing the modded version of Marathon where all the aliens' faces were butts. Then, in my late teens and early 20s, the only jobs I could find were night positions: waiting tables, tending bar, working graveyard shifts at gas stations. Since the only things open after my shift were bars, and since I didn't have a particularly compelling reason not to drink until my brain erased the memory of cleaning the heroin-diarrhea out of a Chevron bathroom stall, I spent most of my non-work hours either drinking or recovering from drinking. And that's why service workers are all alcoholics.

Yep. That's the story we're going with.

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Truly, you are the most unsung of heroes, Hungover Movie Ticket Taker Guy.

In the shittiest kinds of service jobs, they make you work split shifts: That's when you show up and work for six hours, get two hours off, then come back and work for six more hours. In those kinds of jobs, you learn to sleep like soldiers in war movies: whenever and wherever you can get it, because you never know when the next opportunity will be. So I thought my screwed-up internal clock was born out of necessity, and had been bred out by 10 years of normalcy. But apparently my wife's 9-to-5 work schedule was the only fragile cable tethering me to the human world. Without it, I have come entirely unloosed: I get to bed at around 4 a.m. now and sleep for a few hours, then get back up and head into the office. When I get home, I might sleep for a few more hours, if it's too hot for my video card to render Borderlands without crashing -- or maybe I'll just spend the afternoon arguing with my dogs about whose turn it is to turn off the rainbows, because I'm so sleep-deprived that I have completely lost track of the line between dream and reality. For example: I'm pretty sure I hit a giant talking rabbit on my motorcycle yesterday.

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Well, I say "talking," but to be fair, I only heard screaming.

1

The All-Consuming Bitterness

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So we've established that my wife is The Lawgiver, and in the absence of her presence my personal life instantly dissolves into Lord of the Flies. And you know what? I'm surprisingly OK with that: I'm turning out to be pretty good at ensnaring the wild pigs that roam my apartment, and I've only had to kill two fat children with rocks so far. There were conflicts, at first, when my new, simpler, more primal lifestyle had to interface with the stodgy old outside world. Like, say I want to go get the mail: If the wife were around, I'd probably feel pretty silly walking outside in my bathrobe, then growing fearful of the whirly metal things in the sky and attacking the mailman when I got overstimulated. But now, that's just a Tuesday.

The only real problem, if I have to find one, is that I guess I accidentally got my already infinitesimal faith in humanity all tangled up together with my wife, and now that she's gone, the entire world is just a giant, sucking spiral of hatred.

That's turning out to be kind of a hassle.

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And now I have to burn all life to cinders, and return the planet to innocence. You know how it be when the wife is gone.

Without somebody with a little more optimism toward our species to play devil's advocate for all the assholes in the world, I perceive every slight by my fellow man as not only intentional, but part of an overarching plan to ruin the entire universe. And there are, oh, so many slights! Because I live in LA, and LA, as you may know, has an inverse asshole ratio. Allow me to explain: Everywhere else in the civilized world, you can find about three wads of sentient dick for every 10 decent human beings. But Los Angeles is Bizarro World: The whole place is just bursting at the seams with assholes; assholes fall from the sky like raindrops; assholes cascade down the street together, absorbing everything in their path and turning it into more assholes, building asshole momentum until there's a veritable flash flood of assholes hurtling through the city, wiping out everything before it like a biblical plague.

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"I OWN A BMW AND THEREFORE DESERVE TO BE WHEREVER I'M GOING BEFORE YOU."

If that sounds psychotic to you, well, congratulations on spotting the obvious. That community college psychology course is really paying dividends, huh? Obviously it's insane: But that's what single life is to me. I forgot just how goddamn crazy I was without the tempering influence of a normal, compassionate, loving human being in my day-to-day existence. Luckily, a few years ago I tricked that person into signing a contract, and now she wears a piece of metal that legally binds her to me. I have trapped my sanity and ensnared it with a ring. So if you're like me, and your natural mental state is one inconsiderate uncovered cough away from burning down a Pottery Barn, I heartily recommend you do the same.

All things considered, I'm actually glad for this newly single time, because I've learned something from it: I've learned what a good spouse truly is. A good spouse is the anchor that keeps you from being drawn inexorably into a vast, writhing ocean of douchebags and savagery.

Hey, that's pretty good; I should sell that shit to Hallmark. Maybe crochet it onto a throw pillow or something.

Buy Robert's stunning, transcendental, orgasmic science fiction novel, Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, right here. Or buy Robert's other (pretty OK) book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead. Follow him on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

For more from Brockway, check out 5 Surprising Upsides to Getting Married and Deadliest Book Report in the History of 4th Grade.