600 Hours of Edward

the complaints themselves don’t follow any particular pattern; I don’t need the added aggravation of bunching up my complaints about one person, not even my father.
    I think I will complain to Matthew Sweet. This will require that I start a new green office folder.
    Mr. Sweet:
    It pains me to have to write this letter to you, as I am very much a fan of your music. However, two things are bothering me.
    First, I can’t listen to your music when I am waiting to see my therapist, Dr. Buckley. She prefers quiet, more reflective music, and while it would be unfair to say that you’re not reflective, I don’t think “Sick of Myself” is emblematic of the sort of healing and self-respect that Dr. Buckley strives for in her practice. Perhaps you could consider something more upbeat, should you, yourself, someday feel a little more optimistic about things.
    Second, as I’m sure you’re aware, the middle songs on your album
Blue Sky on Mars
are substandard. From “Hollow,” the fourth song, to “Heaven and Earth,” the eighth, you appear to have accepted half-baked songs. You cheapened your talent and swindled your fans by not insisting on a higher level of performance.
    I will say, however, that you acquitted yourself nicely on your next album,
In Reverse
.
    As ever, I remain your fan,
    Edward Stanton

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15
    When my eyes open, I’m lying on my back. The clock says 7:38 a.m. This is a relief to me, after the waking-time debacle from yesterday. That’s 222 days out of 289 this year (because it’s a leap year) that I’ve stirred at 7:38. There is something in my physiology that favors this time. I do not know what it is. I am not a physiologist.
    I reach for my notebook and my pen, flip over to today’s page, and record my wake-up time, and my data is complete.
    – • –
    Today, I am going to paint the garage. I have been in this house that my father bought for eight years (eight years and eighty-eight days). I paint the house and the garage in alternating years. I would prefer to paint them on the same date each year, but weather is too much of a variable.
    Technically speaking, I do not need to paint this often. A good paint job, the only kind that is acceptable, can last ten years or more, even in a climate as erratic as Montana’s. Dr. Buckley tells me that I will feel better if I remain as busy as possible, and I have found that physical busywork is more beneficial than mentalbusywork. For example, I like putting together plastic models of trains and automobiles and such, but often, I will start thinking not of the glue or the paint involved in the model but about something someone has done to irritate me—that someone often being my father—and I end up writing letters of complaint that I am tempted to mail, and this interferes with my project. Dr. Buckley does not want me to mail my letters of complaint. I also like painting the house and the garage, and my mind does not go to other things when I’m doing so because the work is more physically demanding. That’s why, today, I’m going to paint the garage.
    But I can’t paint every day. For one thing, paint needs time to dry. For another, Montana’s weather is such that there is precipitation—that’s rain or snow—every single month of the year. Even if paint somehow magically dried (and there is no such thing as magic) two seconds after you applied it, you would still have to deal with rain and snow. Someday, scientists might make super fast–drying paint. Controlling the weather would be much harder, even for scientists.
    There is also a third reason, which I don’t want to talk about for very long, as it will make me angry. The third reason is my father. There is no way that my father would buy enough paint for me to paint the house and garage every single day, even if I could. I have to fight with him just to paint every year, and I know he will be mad when he sees that I’ve bought nine gallons of paint for a tiny one-car garage. It wasn’t my fault, though. Home Depot had too many choices, and the paint man was not helpful. I need to write him a letter.
    – • –
    After eating a bowl of corn flakes and taking my eighty milligrams of fluoxetine—and after changing into my painting T-shirt and jeans, which are very ratty and thus are kept deep down in my bottom drawer so I don’t have to see them except when they’re needed—I log on to Montana Personal Connect. eHarmony and its twenty-nine levels of