Right now, though, I’m faced with the knowledge that I can’t put off sleep for much longer. I do not want to go to bed, because, if I do, then I will have to go to work in the morning.

I may also have to attend a funeral tomorrow evening for a coworker’s young son, and that seems like a terrible way to start the new year. I can barely imagine that kind of loss, the sort of grief that accompanies the death of a child. I want to extend my sympathies, but I don’t want to attend the services if I’m not wanted there. I don’t know this man terribly well — I never even knew his son’s name, much less that he was sick — and I don’t want to intrude if the family would rather keep its grief private. I suppose there is no right or wrong response — and this should be about them, not me — but I do not know what I will do.

And so I’ve been sitting here for half an hour now, typing and retyping these lines, avoiding sleep even as I feel it creeping closer. I don’t feel ready to face these particular parts of the new year. I don’t want to go to work tomorrow, which my clock now informs me is today. I just want to sleep late, stay in bed, and avoid the messiness that comes with life.

I have to pee. Not all the time, and not right now, but often enough that my house has a special room built just for that purpose. I used to hold it in all day and let loose in my neighbor’s bushes when everyone else had gone to sleep, but my doctor says that I can get arrested for that sort of thing and, even worse, that it might lead to something like kidney infection, discomfort, occasional swelling, or smelling bad if my clothes get wet. None of which, quite frankly, is at the top of my to do list. So now I pee whenever I have to. Provided, of course, that I’m in the special room. It’s a relatively simple process, and I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but I’d like to think I’ve mastered it and could easily compete in the unlikely event it should ever became an Olympic sport. Most people, I think, take urination for granted, which is fine, but I don’t trust anybody who tries to tell me that it isn’t important.

Do you know what else I don’t trust? Magnets. It sounds crazy, I know, but that’s just how it is. I can’t exactly pin it down, but there’s something about them that I just don’t like. It sometimes seems like they’re everywhere, running up and down my refrigerator door like barnacles stuck on the underbelly of a ship, crawling like little metal rats into every dark magnetic corner they can find, lying in wait at the bottom of the cellar stairs with a knife already bloodied from that morning’s kill, a sacrificial offering to some all-consuming totemic god who, even now, cries out for blood! blood! blood!

Well okay, no. Actually they are just on the refrigerator door. But you have to understand, there are so many of them, and they’re so varied in color and shape and size, that I’ve begun to suspect that maybe my wife is sleeping with a traveling magnet salesman. The only thing that prevents me from confronting her with this accusation is my other suspicion that there is no such thing as a traveling magnet salesman. I suspect that she would probably just laugh at me and say that I’m being silly. She might even suggest that I see a doctor again about my so-called “emotional problems”. It’s a difficult situation in which I now find myself, made only more difficult by the fact that I can’t reach the potato salad in the refrigerator without having to read ten or twenty different magnets every day.

Honestly, it’s enough to drive a man to his breaking point. It’s possible that magnets now outnumber people in my house — which is no small feat with the family of seven currently hiding out from the law in our upstairs linen closet. My wife says I should probably ask them to leave, but with the holidays coming up, that just seems kind of cold, you know?

I just wish they’d quit hogging my special room. I really do have to pee.