The Procrastinator

I froze time just before the meteor hit. I’m not sure how I managed it, I just remember screaming real loud. Maybe it needed to happen. It’s still hanging here, halfway through the top story of my house. Suspended. It’s cooled off, probably because molecular activity ceased when time stopped. I’m not sure what to do with it. I tried poking it with a broom, but it’s held fast in mid-air. Not that I necessarily want it to continue its descent into my living room. I should at least move the dinette set first.

Since I’m the only conscious human on earth, I’ve since stopped wearing clothes. The weather is always nice. I tried to dislodge the meteor with a bulldozer, and that didn’t work, but have you ever driven a bulldozer naked? I highly recommend it. In any case, I need to get rid of this thing. Or at least, I feel I do. You know those times when you worry, but your concern feels completely contrived? I’m not even sure if this thing still has acceleration. If it does, we’ll know for only about half a second. If I knock it out of its trajectory, I think we’ll be okay. I think we’ll be okay if I don’t do anything at all, too.

When I’m not trying to budge the meteor, I look at my wife. She’s still in bed, frozen in sleep. Perfect, gentle. This is the only way I ever imagine her. I think I’m more in love with the concept of her than the actual woman, anyway. She looks like a lovely painting, one I can walk into. The art museums and galleries won’t let you stroke the cheek of Aphrodite. You can’t feel her halfway through a breath, the warm air still gathered around her mouth. This is my motivation for doing nothing. Everything is so much more bearable and linear, more real when it is standing still.

Other people were frozen in much more incriminating circumstances. Like the peeping tom down the street, bunched up in his trench coat. I’m tempted to move him outside the house of the gun enthusiast across from us. Not that I haven’t already engaged in my own forms of terrorism. I spent a week (I estimate) expertly inserting chapters from the Kama Sutra into where Revelations should be in all the bibles at our local church. It’s a much happier ending.

I even figured out how to work a printing press and made my boss new business cards that say things like “our impending corporate merger makes me touch myself”. I hope 700 cards is enough for at least most of our downtown locations. Supply and demand, you know. In any case, I’m making the world a better place while I try and keep it from being destroyed. Or maybe I just destroy things more subtly than the meteor. I painted a face on it yesterday. We get along, mostly.

The problem is, I keep getting distracted. I’ve been considering locating every squatting dog in the city to the dining room of that fancy restaurant that always takes our parking. That’s another full week, not that I can tell. I am entirely too productive when there is no passage of time.

I bounced a tennis ball off the meteor today. I wore my baseball glove. It’s the first time we played catch.

When this first happened, I felt an urgent need to get rid of the thing and unfreeze time as fast as possible. Now I feel a sort of solidarity with it. Even if I find a way to keep it from destroying Earth, I’d like to keep it. It might make a nice centerpiece in our living room. A 45-ton coffee table.

I pretend like I’m going to set things straight in a timely manner. I plan to call my mom more often. I’ll try and be a better husband, for real. I picked up some necklaces for my wife, for when I can talk to her again. But it’s not going to be anytime soon. Tonight, I’m sitting on the meteor and watching the perpetual sunrise.