Tuesday is my long day

Today I left for work just as Cosmico was opening his eyes, and returned long after he had closed them, already off in the world of dreams and snuffling in his sleep like some truffle pig in hot pursuit of a fungus. Let us hear it for the absentee father. Let us hear it for a work schedule that keeps a man at the office from 8:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night. While we're at it, let's hear it for that crustaceous krankelweib who greets me in the kitchen upon my return, and that rich sense of venial omission that rumbles in my gut an hour after getting up from the table, and that creeping dread at the prospect of getting out of bed tomorrow. Let us hear it for long hours in the company of truth and beauty, or at least in the life-consumptive pursuit of peer reviewed journal articles with an impact factor of 3, and for that noble committment to the training of a new generation, a generation that doesn't do their homework and doesn't ask questions but pays their yearly forty thou with clock-like regularity and expects in return to get B's for having stood the course, shown up day after pointless day, a pulse in a room of pulses, all keeping meticuluous track of Time Served, ticking it off, watching it go, like that bank of cessium clocks at the NSH, only more consistent and better polished.