You ever wonder what your life would be like it if were different? It wouldn’t be the same, right?

Sometimes I think about how things could be different in my life when I’m just sitting around by myself. Like, when sugar-mama is on the road for work, I might think, “What if sugar-mama wasn’t in my life?”

I don’t mean that as if I don’t want sugar-mama around. Hell, she’s hands down among the top three best things that’s ever happened to me. Okay, by finding me a new tattoo artist down here in Atlanta, she’s pretty much solidified the No. 1 spot. It’s not really that close actually, although winning those front row concert tickets to ZZ Top (with Extreme opening) in the summer of 1992 was pretty cool. And the first time I had a McRib with pickles was a damn seminal moment in time if there ever was one.

No, I mean, I think about what it’d be like if I wasn’t so lucky to have sugar-mama around and instead, if I was solo all the time. I’m not sure I’d survive anymore.

Point in case:

Sugar-mama came home a few days ago and said she had to go to Houston this week from Tuesday to Thursday and then Pittsburgh for the first three days next week. Normally, a guy may think that’s awesome that he gets the place to himself. And I typically do think that. At first. Then it sets in that things won’t be the same.

I’m not concerned about having to make my own food or taking care of teamCAC. That happens every day right now. It’s more that nothing really gets done the same as when I know she’s going to be home that night.

Take the last, oh, day and half.

If she was here last night and tonight, I would have made dinner twice, had breakfast, spent time talking with her after she got home from work, probably done some of my legwork on articles I have to turn in in the next few days, gone to bed around midnight and after playing on the Internet this afternoon, I would have been generally more in-tune with the world. You know, just in case she pops a question on me about current affairs or something.

But when she’s gone, it’s completely different.

I took her to work around 9 a.m. Tuesday and she left from there, taking the train to the airport and didn’t come back home. So I’ve been here in the house on my own the rest of the time. I haven’t gone anywhere, except to run back downtown yesterday afternoon to give her something she forgot. But that’s about 50 minutes roundtrip. I haven’t even opened the outside door today and at 11:19 p.m. just realized I didn’t get the mail yet.

So she’s gone roughly 30 hours and during that time, I have been productive for less than 1/13 of the time I normally would be. I’ve only written some of my “freelance” stuff that absolutely had to be turned in today, which took a total of about 4 hours between the two days.

Otherwise, in that time, I’ve watched seven whole basketball games, parts of three other basketball games, a half of football, two concerts on Palladia and set my lineups for my fantasy football teams three times.

And I ate nothing resembling what I’d normally have if she was here. It has consisted of one legitimate meal which was hot Italian sausage with onions and tomatoes that I started cooking at 9:43 p.m. tonight. I also have consumed about 16 Chewy granola bars, nine pieces of sliced cheese, a bacon sandwich, three ice cream bars, two 2-liters of Diet Dew and a Luna bar.

I did manage today to spend 23 minutes cleaning the kitchen by doing dishes, taking out garbage and sweeping, but that was offset as I sat, laid and slothed on the couch from Noon to 9:30 p.m. today reading 445 pages of The Lost Symbol, finishing the 638-page book that I bought two weeks ago. That was after reading 163 pages last night after I stopped watching basketball.

I did get a 4.0-mile run in yesterday, but by 8 p.m. tonight, my ass and hips were sore from laying so much on the couch, where I also slept last night. I would guess that if she’s been on the road for work or just out of town visiting family and/or friends for a total of 12 nights in the past year, at least 11 of those nights I slept on the couch with the TV on.

No, fuckers, I’m not afraid of the dark, I just don’t like being alone in a quiet, dark house. That probably goes back to the horror movies–the bad B-movies from the late ’70s and early ’80s where people always got killed in the basement laundry room and never saw the dude with the ice pick coming–that my step-mom loved to watch when I was a kid and that she’d make me watch with her at her parents’ house across the street from our one-bedroom little house.

And then she’d send me down to the basement to get clothes out of the laundry room or start a new load of there wasn’t already some down there. Almost every time, she’d sneak down while I was folding clothes and scare the shit out of me. Or she’d send one of her sisters down to do it.

And I’m just realizing that my laziness is contagious too, I think. My black cat, F’ing, has taken up my slothiness. Instead of her normal 20 hours of sleep, she is now sleeping in my blanket for what appears to be the 29th straight hour.

She’s on the couch beside me, which is just a few feet from the piles of Chewy wrappers, unopened mail, car keys and Netflix sitting on the table, which is only feet from the TV. I have only turned the television off while I was reading and will probably keep on for a while longer tonight as I watch the fourth quarter of a bad MAC football game before turning on last night’s Sons of Anarchy on the DVR.

So, to summarize, cleaning; eating regularly, normally or healthily; and not being a complete couch potato are not things that I’d do well if I was still on my own. Luckily I don’t have to worry about that much. Now I just can’t wait for sugar-mama to get home.