Living With Uncle Lawrence

     I was about 10 years old when my parents got divorced. From that point onward Christmas was a split day for me. Christmas morning I woke up at mom’s and did the tree thing with my half brother and sister, and then I went over to Grandma’s house with my dad and various members of that side of the family for dinner and presents and such. My uncle lived at Grandma’s house, and so he would be there. I always got him a present, informed-by and paid-for by my dad on our annual Christmas shopping day a few weeks before December 25. One of my favorite gifts to my uncle was a relief map of California, about two feet wide, three feet tall, and two inches deep. To this day that map hangs on a wall outside my uncle’s bedroom, still mostly wrapped in the plastic it came in.
     My uncle’s presents to me usually seemed like the kind of thing you come up with when you don’t give a fuck about Christmas, holidays, or presents -- a 10 dollar bill in an envelope or a repurposed birthday card or something like that. One year when I was getting on in age, late teens maybe, he gave me an alarm clock. Given his track record I consciously chalked it up to gift-apathy, like he had a boxed alarm clock laying around on December 25. I said thanks and brought it home. I never used it. I secretly hated it. There was a thought in the back of my mind that my uncle gave it to me as a message. “Hey weirdo, you’re getting old, wake up.”
     I don’t remember how old I was when I got the alarm clock, but I do remember being self aware enough to know that I was kind of a weird kid, in the more traditional sense of the word “weird”. I got bad grades in school and wore funny clothes and played in rock bands. I wore a black trench coat to high school (in sunny Southern California) before that kind of thing got you sent to special meetings. He was/is weird, too, but his weirdness was/is expressed as a kind of warped normalcy. I don’t want to go into a full character study here, so I’ll use pop culture references as a shortcut. My uncle is a mixture of Ned Flanders and Norman Bates, but with less Jesus and way less murder. Giving me an alarm clock as a Christmas present was his version of stabbing me to diddly dong death in the showeroo!
(credit to https://lingojam.com/EnglishtoNedFlanders for that last sentece.)
     All of the above is a preamble. I’ve been living with my uncle for five or six months now. We are still both weird. I live in the upstairs, which has a separate entrance and bathroom, and I don’t use the kitchen, so we don’t see each-other very much. A couple of weeks ago, in a far corner of the space I inhabit, this space-heater suddenly showed up.

     I don’t know where the space heater came from. I also didn’t think much of it the fact that it is where it is now. I live with the guy that gave me an alarm clock for Christmas.

     The other night I smoked a cigarette outside, as I often do. I felt like I was done smoking about halfway through, however, and so I snuffed it out and left it on the railing outside my door, because hey I might want to finish it later. I don’t remember finishing it. Tonight I got home and noticed this little screw sitting exactly where I had left the butt, and I guess a line was crossed in my mind because I sat down and wrote all the words you’ve read thus-far. I’m 90% inspired and 10% creeped out. 

     From the looks of it he took the butt and replaced it with this screw. It is in the exact place I remember leaving the butt. Maybe in another 20 years I’ll figure out what it all means but in the mean time I’m just happy to have something to make me feel like writing rather than playing video games or listening to podcasts or whatever.