teacups to beer bottles

You know those perfect mornings for sleeping late? You don’t have to go anywhere, and it’s warm enough to have your window open, yet the breeze that comes through is slightly cool, cool enough to make you huddle deeper under your blankets to find the exact right amount of warmth to keep you perfectly comfortable for hours, and oh, it’s raining a gentle steady rain that you don’t have to pay any kind of attention to at all, but you listen to it anyway and it’s quiet, rhythmic, and you can feel it lulling you back to sleep? I was having one of those mornings, and on a Monday, too. Oh sure, I have stuff to do later, and I was aware of it, but I thought maybe I would be really crazy and sleep until some wildly indulgent time of the morning, like, I don’t know, nine. (I was up pretty late last night. I was reading. Because, as ever, I know how to party.)

I heard some noise outside of my window, like some person with nervously shaky hands carrying teacups wobbling in their saucers. But it was a lot louder than that. It was like maybe this person had 100 hands and 100 wobbly teacups. It’s one of those thoughts that only makes sense when I’m more than half asleep. I had been almost asleep. Two seconds more of the cool breeze and the quiet rain and I would’ve been completely knocked out, but the teacup noise persisted. I buried my head between my pillows, hoping to block out the glass-against-glass noise, still clinging to my dream of not being awake just then, when the person outside started yelling. “Ron! HEY! RON!” I stayed where I was, growing more awake by the second. The sound was no longer reminiscent of teacups; it was a more insistent clanking. “ROOOONNNN!” I was completely awake by then, but also completely in denial. I frowned at the open window, willing whoever was just beyond it to shut the hell up. “RON! ROOOONNNN!”

I threw back the blankets and sat up. “Oh fucking hell,” I said, getting out of bed. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Maybe I would say “If you’re going to be an obnoxious ass, the least you could do is be an obnoxious ass in front of someone else’s window because I JUST WANTED TO SLEEP. MY GOD, I WANTED TO SLEEP AND YOU’RE RUINING IT SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UUUUUUUUUUP.” Or maybe I would be really badass and defiantly close my window. I didn’t know, but I was serious, y’all.

Upon arriving at the window, I looked out to see the source of all this clanking glass and Ron-yelling, and I was greeted with the sight of a man on the sidewalk in front of my window, bent over (ass facing me, of course) and digging through a clear garbage bag full of beer bottles. I watched for a moment. “Well,” I said to myself, “how about that?” My brain, amused, replied “How often can you say that a hobo got you out of bed?”

Indeed. I can say it now. How about you?

Without closing the window, I returned to bed and got back underneath the covers, thinking that certainly I could go right back to sleep after that. The man yelled “RON!” one last time and then there was a flurry of clanking bottles, if clanking bottles can indeed flurry and I’m not convinced they can, so let’s just say that the noise reached a crescendo, then faded away. My hobo alarm clock was gone.

I lay there for a moment, determined to enjoy the silence, but not in a Depeche Mode sort of way, more like, ah, quiet. I could hear the rain again. I closed my eyes again, prepared to drift off to sleep, and then realized that I had to pee. I sighed and got out of bed, dreams of decadent laziness fading away like the percussion of clanking beer bottles being carried off down the street in the morning rain.

But hey, he did leave me a present:

Nice. I love souvenirs.