The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Today's Sunday. I get up at 7 am. Then I go to the living room and OH JESUS CHRIST THERE'S A GHOST BOY SITTING ON THE SOFA.

Oh, wait. It's just 5-year-old sitting alone in the dark.

"Good morning, Daddy."

"JESUS, you scared me. How long have you been up?"

"I woke up a long time ago. When I come here the clock said a six, a two and a zero."

He means 6:20 am. So he's been sitting in the dark for the last forty minutes??

***

In the afternoon I start sorting out the kitchen cupboards. One of the shelves is full of Girlfriend's old cassette tapes.

"Do you want to keep these?" I say.

"What are they?"

"It's your old tapes. Do you want to keep them? Because we could actually keep something useful in this cupboard instead, like food? You know — something we need to eat to survive?

"You don't have to be rude about it."

She's right.

"Sorry," I say.

She looks through the tapes. "I guess I don't need to keep them," she says. "I haven't listened to them in decades."

I look through the tapes. There's Bon Jovi, Greenday, Beatles. She wrote the names of each track on the cassette sleeve with a blue biro. I imagine her as a teenager, lying on her bed and carefully writing the names of her favourite tracks onto each cassette sleeve.

"Sad, isn't it?" I say. "Throwing away childhood stuff."

"This was my childhood," she says. "This was all the music I listened to."

.Oh well. I chuck the tapes in the bin.

The next thing I throw out is the cleaning robot. It cost us €179 when we bought it six years ago and it's been nothing but a pain since. Leave it to clean the floors and ten minutes later it's beeping hysterically for help because it's stuck on a doorstop. Set it clean the entire apartment and it'll clean the same spot over and over while the rest of the house remains dirty. Tell it to clean the kitchen and five minutes later it's beeping for help again because the battery's almost dead.

I could try to sell it, but I haven't, so I'm throwing it.

I carry the cleaning robot outside. The streets are empty. I leave the cleaning robot next to the bin, along with the charging base and remote control. Maybe someone else will take it.

An hour later, I go for a walk with 1-year-old in the sling. I pass by the bins. The cleaning robot has gone. Someone has already taken it.

We go to a flea market. I find a toy figure of an Eskimo. I want it. I don't particularly like Eskimos but it's Lego Duplo, and I collect Lego Duplo figures. I have a hundred figures already. Duplo is a toy intended for children aged 2 to 5, by the way.

"How much is this?" I ask.

"One euro," says the man.

I check my wallet. Shit: there's no money.

So after lunch, I take a euro coin from 5-year-old's money box and go back to the market. But I'm too late. The stall has already gone. Maybe I can buy it next week.

In the evening, I take the kids to the playground. 5-year-old's on his bike and 1-year-old's on a scooter. The scooter has a seat which 1-year-old sits on it while I push him around. He's never done this before and he loves it. He sits on it for a long time and doesn't want to get off. We try to race 5-year-old around the playground but he's too fast for us on his bike.

When the kids have gone to bed, I'm on my laptop googling "sociopath psychopath difference" out of curiosity, and I find myself reading accounts of sociopaths on r/sociopath, and I start thinking I might actually be one. I don't care much about other people, I get bored listening to people's problems. I wasn't sad when my mom died. I have to mentally remind myself to be kind to people because otherwise I forget, like when I was rude to Girlfriend earlier.

Anyway, I go to bed.