Routines

12/3/14, “Routines”

New York, New York

The scene: 1:30 in the morning, a dimly lit city apartment.  The floor is strewn with various articles, ranging from laptops to shoulder bags to a laundry bag, the most noticeable object a brightly lit air purifier, which is responsible for the only sound that can be heard.  Another light turns on in the pantry and a rustling sound is heard, followed by a slow and steady crunching sound.  The camera pans to the pantry and zooms in on a man in his twenties, 6’2”, 225 pounds, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, a scruffy face the result of not having shaved in two days, absentmindedly snacking on a bag of baked pita chips.  He is clearly preoccupied by his own thoughts.

What is he thinking about?  He is thinking about how much his life has changed in the past 7 years.  He is thinking how his 20s have blown by him in ways that he never expected.  He is thinking about how happy he is in his life, how happy he has been for 3 years now, about the wonderful people that have entered his life.  He is also thinking about the people who have left his life, the “fading friendships” as he calls them.  Above all, he is thinking of one of those fading friendships, the first person who visited him when he moved into this building six years ago, the girl who was his best friend for over a year, the one person from all those fading friendships whom he still remembers fondly.

By the time he finishes the bag of chips, all such thoughts have disappeared.  He just wants to sit in his chair and smoke his pipe, which he hopes will help him fall asleep.  Having just travelled halfway around the world literally for a weekend, he has not slept through the night in a week.  In fact, he had not been back in the country for 48 hours yet, and he was nowhere near recovered on his sleep.  By all rights, he should have been dead tired.  Instead, he is still awake at 1:30 in the morning, and sleep seems as distant to him as do the sites he had just seen in India.  He is not stressed.  He is not worried.  He is not caffeinated.  He is simply not tired.  This is not his usual routine.  He throws the empty bag of chips into the garbage, and the camera follows him as he walks back to his smoking chair.  He lights up his Tuesday Dunhill pipe.  He has not slept yet.  It is still Tuesday as far as he is concerned.  That is part of his routine.  The scene cuts out.

Scene two: the same apartment, 19 hours later, the same man, 19 hours of additional scruff on his beard, a different pipe in his mouth, the 2007 Christmas Pipe.  He smoked the 2006 Christmas Pipe a few days ago.  Of course he would smoke the 2007 Christmas Pipe next.  His routines would not allow anything else.  What the viewer does not know, not unless they know him, is that this is a man of routines.  It is man who finds it almost impossible to break his routines.  He will establish new routines, but altering his routines is not something he does easily.

The sequence of events that transpired to lead up to him sitting in that chair were mere happenstance, and it forced him to alter his routines.  What are these routines?  His evenings are planned with almost clockwork precision.  Mondays he has dinner with his girlfriend.  For Four months, Monday has been their night, even before they started dating.  Tuesday and Thursday he pursues his philosophy degree at the local college, spending an hour talking with one of his best friends after the last class as he smokes his cigar, the same Romeo y Julieta Churchill each evening.  The weekends he either travels or spends time in the city with his friends or goes to his parents’ house in the suburbs.  It might vary week to week, but it is always one of those three.  This is clearly a man who loves his routines.

Our reader might now wonder about his Wednesdays.  Well, he used to have a different Wednesday routine, now, he leaves that as his “variable” day.  Yes, this is a man that loves his routines so much that he plans one specific day a week to “shake things up.”  In the new semester, with a new class schedule, he will come up with a new set of routines, but, as the semester winds down, he will stick to his routines right up until the moment that he finishes that last Churchill and hugs his friend goodbye before she heads off to Israel and Greece.  He will fight back tears because, even though they will promise to stay in touch, he knows that they will likely never see each other again.  He fears that she will just become another “fading friendship.”  He will be leaving the country himself three days later, to head on a cruise to Antarctica, and, when he gets back, he will develop new routines.

As he sits in his chair, smoking his 2007 Christmas Pipe, as he has done every year since 2007, he looks around his apartment and thinks how much his life has changed since last December.  He feels warmth.  The space heater behind him is new.  Last December, he did not have heat in his apartment.  By choice, he had his radiator removed and chose instead to bundle up and sleep under multiple layers.  The sheets on his bed where he is resting his feet are new.  The souvenirs on his dresser, directly in his line of sight, while not all new, are newly displayed.  The pipe, the ashtrays, the chair, all old.  Even the laptop he is using to type this entry is old.

He thinks about the people who recognize him solely because of his routines.  He looks at his laundry bag.  A year and a half ago, he came back from New Orleans to find that his Laundromat had shut down.  He would need to find a new routine.  He found a new Laundromat.  At his old Laundromat, he would walk in a few minutes to close, and the woman there would always grumble and moan that it was so late.  Now, at the new Laundromat, the guy there smiles and greets him cheerfully.  “Hi, Steh-ven,” he says and quickly brings him his bag of clean clothes.  He thinks about the store where he bought the tobacco he is now smoking, the place where he goes almost every day, the place where everyone knows his name.  Of the people working there full-time now, none of them were there two years ago, only one or two were there full-time a year ago.  His routine has not changed in spite of the staff changes.

He thinks about the two places where he goes for lunch every week: the pizzeria where he gets his wings and the Chinese restaurant.  He remembers how yesterday, when he walked into the pizzeria, the waitress greeted him with a big smile and, without even having to ask, brought him two cans of Diet Dr. Pepper.  She only had two words for him, “The usual?”  Of course he would be having his usual.  He loves his routines.  Of course he would not be breaking them.  A few minutes later, he is presented with a big plate of wings.  He thinks about the Chinese restaurant, how he always orders almost exactly same thing, how the guy there greets him jovially, even if he has not quite gotten the hang of his “usual” after over half a year.

But what about his grand plans for tonight?  He was going to have dinner with his mother and grandfather at their favorite place, the place the three of them always have dinner together.  He was going to get the same thing he always gets.  He was going to drink ouzo and Greek coffee.  He was then going to go the train station with his grandfather, wait with him until his train came, light up a cigar, and walk back to his apartment, just as he does every time he has dinner with his grandfather.  It is part of their routine.  An email from his mother changed that.  His grandfather would no longer be able to join them.  Instead, he stayed at the office and went to the cigar store.  He had even picked out his cigar to smoke.  He got to the cigar store, cut his cigar, and, just as he was about to light it, got into a lively and animated discussion with one of the workers.  He put his unlit cigar down as he had the discussion.  In the meantime, unbeknownst to him, the other two workers played a prank on him.

After the discussion, he turned around, but his cigar was gone.  The discussion so lively, and he so tired and hungry, his short-term memory had become fuzzy.  Did he really take the cigar out?  He checked all of his pockets.  He couldn’t find it.  Maybe it fell down somewhere?  It was nowhere to be found.  He suspected the workers of the prank, but he wasn’t quite sure.  In the meantime, he remembered that he had a half-smoked cigar in a tube in his pocket.  He would finish that, go home, drop off his stuff, and then have dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant in his neighborhood.  That would work great.  Then the workers revealed their prank and returned his cigar.  It would be the perfect to cigar to smoke after his dinner.

A text from his girlfriend changed his routine once more.  Their favorite singer would be singing at the tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.  He couldn’t miss that.  He had thought the tree-lighting was tomorrow.  The plan he had for the evening would not work.  Instead, he goes home, turns the ceremony on immediately, and orders himself some Chinese food, not willing to vary his routine more than he already had.  After he finishes his food, he lights up his pipe.  The tree is lit an hour later, and his pipe is finished soon after that.  For once, he is finally tired, and, he looks forward to getting a full night’s rest, just as he did last Wednesday.  While he has developed many new routines over the past year, so many of routines are the same as they were last year, even as they were 7 years ago.