Twenty-Four Hours Is a Joke
My name is Marcel Winatschek and I am currently so stressed that a new word should probably be invented for it, because the existing ones don’t cover the specific texture of this particular suffocation. The 24-hour day contains far too few minutes to fit everything that needs to happen for my life to develop in a direction I’d consider acceptable. Right now this orbits three major areas: my apprenticeship, this journal, and anal sex—by which I don’t mean I’ve switched teams, but rather that my private life is fucking me thoroughly and repeatedly from behind. Or the other way around, depending on the day.
So I throw myself out of bed at dawn while the bats are still dancing and the roosters are still asleep, scroll through the night’s accumulated content looking for something worth posting, rarely make it past the porn without expertly touching myself, then head off to work or vocational school depending on the week, and spend whatever distant thing passes for an evening with parties, romance, or horizontal inertia.
And what sounds perfectly manageable when I describe it like that is, in reality, complete and total war. Because while the apprenticeship buries you in projects that chase you through your sleep cycles like a horror franchise, you also need to maintain contacts, write at least three solid posts a day, dig through other people’s blogs and leave traces, kiss girls, use Twitter, call your family, shower or bathe, watch films and series, knead breasts, fill the Tumblr, make coffee, update Facebook, have sex, love things, hate things, try drugs, do laundry, earn money, shit and piss, take public transport, wash dishes, buy groceries, attend parties, think, make beds, conduct and translate interviews, develop or steal ideas, send texts, slap prostitutes, plan upcoming projects, chat with people who matter to your continued existence, eat three times a day, do favors, maintain the technical side of the site, wander around, suck up to Merlin Bronques, drink alcohol, answer emails, read magazines, kill zombies, tidy and clean the apartment, listen to music, do fake exercise, read books, water plants, and fulfill wishes. In 24 hours. Daily if possible. Sleep not yet mentioned.
Life is a bitch, and I formally demand that the time god, the state, or The Hoff™ extend the day by at least double. I’m contributing ten euros toward a drug that keeps sleep as far from us as possible, and I’ll spend this weekend ignoring the worst items on the death list, cherry-picking a few bullet points—probably something involving sex and zombies—and getting properly drunk tonight in honor of Lindsay Lohan. And if anyone gets in my way, that could turn fatal. I’m stressed, and I therefore hold a license for bloody massacre, preferably at a Russian airport.