This morning I woke up at 2 to the sound of people in my living room banging on snare drums singing "Yellow Submarine". At 5, I woke up to the sound of an old woman searching the garbage can beneath my window for empty bottles.

I thought the whole point of cashing in bottles for a living was not having to be up at 5 AM.

I woke up later and found Gerald on the couch in his underwear. I got him up, and he asked if I could drive to work. On the way in he was shaking.

Last night I went with he and Matt to a bar down the street to watch the Superbowl. When I left, they were ordering shots of a drink called Prairie Fire that consists of tequila and tabasco.

This weekend it was kind of wet and then got cold very suddenly, fusing all of the various items of trash to Gerald's garbage car in a veneer of ice.

There was a Snickers wrapper plastered flat on the trunk with the word "HUNGERECTOMY" pointing up at me.

Gerald held it together for the first few hours, sweating booze in his cube and taking calls. Then lunch came and he ended up getting a seafood salad sub by mistake. He opened it, turned green, and disappeared into the bathroom for awhile.

I also got to see a burial in the graveyard behind our office. A bunch of people were standing out there for what seemed like 20 minutes.

It was absolutely freezing out there. I wondered how in hell they dug the hole.

Fitzy said over the summer he saw a funeral where they were burying someone in a plus-sized casket and the harness snapped on one side. They ended up having to get a backhoe to haul the thing out. He said the last few burials were pretty boring, so we were bound to get a "good one" soon.

I've never heard anyone feel they were due for a cemetary mishap.

When I got home, Matt apologized for all the noise and said he hoped he didn't wake me up. I said it hadn't, and he said he felt bad about it.

He wanted to give me a case of Right Guard as a make-good, but I told him it was nothing and he didn't have to give me anything. He told me I was a "good shit" and gave me the case of deodorant anyway.

I took it back to my room and put it in the corner. I hate the smell of Right Guard.