Ted Rees

Awakened at 5:45 by the old pitbull with a UTI, tried to coax her outside but she just wanted to sit at the top of the stairs. 

Tried to fall back asleep for a few minutes, but quickly gave up and opened my phone and read the news. 

For some reason had a difficult time deciding what I should wear and how I should wear it, settled on shorts with no underwear and a shirt I wore yesterday. 

Got the kettle going, ground the medium roast in the coffee grinder I have had for more than 20 years, and fed the pitbull and the young hound, a needy little asshole who is too cute to give up on. 

Outside, the old girl pissed daintily and the young buck sprayed all over some traffic cones. She took a huge shit before we went back inside. Their pre-walk walk has become a calming ritual for me, a few minutes where I can feel the air on my skin and see the light as it rises.

I cut up two figs from the garden and spread them on my overnight oats, then pour the water over the coffee grounds in the french press. 

After drinking my electrolyte drink and eating my oats, I settle into John Taggart’s Remaining in Light, a truly odd book about reading an Edward Hopper painting through Derrida, Jabes, and Dickinson. I enjoy the book, but wish that there were more reproductions— it’s sort of like if a TJ Clark book was mostly text and theory rather than reproductions and close visual assessment in tandem. 

After twenty minutes of reading, eating, and drinking coffee, I do my toilet and then my morning stretches, including a one minute hang on the pull-up bar, shoulder rotations, cossack squats, and a few others. It’s imperative to get the blood flowing. 

The dogs get walked to Malcolm X park and back. On our way, we see a lot
of kids heading to their first day of school at GLASW, and also witness a fender bender cause by some dickhead riding hard in the middle lane trying to sneak into the regular lanes of traffic. Philly drivers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Back at home, I make a sandwich, pack up all of my stuff for work, and get dressed in proper attire: jock, jeans, and polo shirt. It’s my first day teaching in person on Temple’s campus since March of 2020, and while I am tempted to wear shorts, I just can’t do it. 

Before driving up to North Broad, though, I go and feed my friends’ cats, Pickle and Simon. It is my last day taking care of them because Mark and Sarah get home today from their road trip, so I give the two chonky boys a little treat of an extra half can. 

The drive to North Broad is unremarkable and as I remember it. Free jazz plays on the stereo, some Brandon Seabrook record from a few years ago. The confusion of the parking garage is palpable, and I quickly realize that I have totally forgotten the location of the building where my first class takes place. I am pointed in the right direction, only to realize that this is where my last course on campus took place more than four years ago. A little weird.

Things go well in the course, “Writers at Work,” and then I have an hour break so I eat my sandwich (turkey with avocado and baby kale on wheat) and buy an iced coffee. The next class, an intermediate poetry workshop, is in a large conference room that I abhor, but I deal with it and it seems like the students will be a good group to write poetry with for the next few months. I am especially and immediately fond of one of the students who speaks to me excitedly about two of her friends who want to take the course. 



Back to the parking garage. It’s only 1p. I drive to the Fresh Grocer on Oxford and get a sandwich for dinner with unbelievable macros— 3g fat, 40g carbs, 42 grams protein— along with two energy drinks and three large seltzer bottles. I then take Oxford to Ridge, which I follow all the way to Scotts Lane, where I make a right and then another into the parking lot of my second job, desk staff at the rock climbing gym. 

I am a little early, but that’s okay because I need to do a workout. 55 pull-ups, some sets of jackknives, rotator cuff weighted arm raises, reverse wrist curls, finger curls, and wrist pronator rotations round out the workout, and then I’m on shift. It’s a Monday so pretty tame in terms of work that needs to get done, but one of my work buddies Brendan is in the space for a few hours running a clinic, so we hang out and chat, which is always nice. Brendan is the best.

Taylor comes in and tells me all about her lectures from PA school and we gossip a bit, then sort through our duties and get some stuff done. I have been playing DJ Harvey’s Record Box playlist on the gym stereo for a few hours, so the vibes are good. Theo texts me and tells me that he is getting halal food with our friends Mimi and Heifara, who are visiting the east coast from Oregon. I am jealous but it seems I will get home in time to share in the bounty. 

Indeed, when I get back to West Philly, the three of them are walking up with bags and bags of food. I hang out and eat some hummus and deep-fried cauliflower. It’s nice to be with friends at the end of a long day. 

Before bed, I take a shower and roll out my back. Sleep arrives just as I finish the seventh chapter of Edith Wharton’s Summer, a novel I found in a little free library and which I thought might work nicely as a quick read before Labor Day really whisks us into autumn. 

I often think that my busiest and most active days are behind me, but then I have a day like this day in Philadelphia, and I realize that there’s probably something in me that propels me toward days like this, and I honestly don’t even mind— I just wish I had more time for naps.

Ted Rees is the author of Hand Me the Limits and Dog Day Economy, both available from Roof Books. Thanksgiving: a Poem was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Gay Poetry in 2021.