Typical Day
It's 6:05AM, and Barry's alarm clock has been buzzing for the last ten minutes. Finally stirring, he rolls over and slaps the off button. As he sits up, he feels the knots tighten like a fist of fury in his lower back. Groggy and in a bearable-but-annoying amount of pain, Barry begins his morning routine.
He throws on a comfortable pair of jeans and a t-shirt and heads into the kitchen for breakfast (and, more importantly, coffee). No shower this morning―or really, any morning. It would be pointless to scrub himself down with lavender-scented soap before going to spend the day getting covered in rock dust and man sweat (mostly his own).
Barry is a stonemason, and for the past several years he's become something of a specialist in building and repairing with stone, also known as fixer masonry. That means he'll be spending the next eight-to-ten hours out in the elements, working his craft on-site.
Barry does a quick ten-minute stretch, doctor's orders. At thirty-five years old, the strain in Barry's back is nothing new, but as he gets older the muscles don't work as well as they used to. A few months prior, he threw out his back. He has been cleared to return to work, provided he takes better care of himself than he did when he was twenty-two. He packs a lunch and heads out to his pickup. At 8:10AM, he puts the key in the ignition, and it's time to rock and roll.
Start time varies from job to job; today's is 8:30AM. Barry has been working on this project, renovating an old factory into a multi-use residential and commercial space, for a couple of weeks now. Like any sports team or theater ensemble, a construction crew can become almost like a tight-knit family, and this one is no different.
The moment he arrives, he begins the routine of joshing around with the rest of the crew―except for Josh, who mostly stays to himself. Apparently some of them are heading to a bar after work. Barry says he'll think about it. He grabs a cup of coffee (generously provided by the clients), puts on his safety equipment, and gets to work.
By 10:00AM, Barry has already fixed a quarter of the southern wall. This particular wall was verified structurally sound, so instead of smashing it and rebuilding, he makes repairs to the façade (that's French for "face").
The new stones that Barry uses for replacements have all been precut, preshaped, and predestined for specific uses in a workshop by carver and banker masons, but he has to make minor adjustments before moving on. It's kind of like fixing a jigsaw puzzle after your dog has chewed on a dozen pieces―only if the new pieces don't fit exactly right, the puzzle might fall over and kill a bunch of people.
12:30PM hits and the lunch whistle blows. Well, not really a whistle, but the foreman's voice is pretty high. Barry heads over to the lunch area, a semi-circle of cement blocks and plywood tables with buckets for chairs. Today's lunch: ham and cheese on marble rye, some apple slices, a diet soda, and two aspirin. It's not that Barry is in that much pain, he'd just like to keep it that way. He takes a quick nap under a tree in the (untouched) yard before finding his way back to his wall at 1:30PM.
With the sun beginning its final descent, Barry finishes his last stone around 5:30PM. He checks out with the foreman, and says his laters to some of the crew. Not all of them, though; Barry's totally going to that bar. There's just something he wants to do first.
Barry steps out of the shower around 6:15PM. His lavender-scented body feels a lot nicer than it did that morning. Even after a full day in the hot sun, a few moments of warm water and soapy goodness (plus a microwave dinner) is enough to re-energize him. Unsurprisingly, when Barry shows up to the bar around 7:00PM cleaner than an altar boy, the fellas make fun of him for a good ten minutes.
Of course, they're not laughing anymore by 8:15PM, when Barry gets the number from the cute girl at the corner table. Barry: 1, stinky friends: 0.
At 10:00PM, Barry is home again and it's time for bed. After a few easy stretches (again, doctor's orders), he climbs under the covers. Tomorrow will be another day of hammering and chiseling, but tonight is simply sleep, the greatest luxury in his life. Within minutes, Barry is in dreamland, where he battles a rock lizard to save that cute girl from the bar. Stonemason by day, stone hero by night: This is Barry's daily life.