My pants sit on a broken
easy-chair opposite me in the living room. A stack of
wasted money in the form of
once-viewed DVDs mocks me while a
Garfield doll smiles.
Smug bastard. A photo of my brother and now-sister on their wedding day stands beside a pair of
kissing parrot figurines which conspire with the happy couple to
further my depression. Serving as a perch to these objects of discontent, a television and his henchmen work tirelessly to suck the life from my body. They are asleep now. Dust covers everything. A
samurai's livelihood poses beneath the television's sagging
teak throne; two
Japanese swords lie sheathed on a stand - a
katana and the sword used in the
Hara Kiri ritual (the name of which an
ignorant, americanised kid like myself wouldn't know) - their blades too dull to accomplish any but their
manufacturers' goal: to cut money from the pants of
affluent white men with Yellow Fever. Dozens of pieces of art around the room serve to validate the
fetish - all but one being Asian.
A razor's edge jumps to mind when I look at the smaller sword;
longing and fantasy sometimes give me hope when I pull back the sheath. It's still dull. The swords are framed by heating vents which will blow the
accumulated dust of half a dozen months into my air when the cold comes. Electrical cords run everywhere around the edges of the room - a
fire hazard for the
optomist and the
pessimist in me.
Nothing will change. One window stands bare of all four in the room. Through it pours once daily a beam of light that obstructs the
television's numbing glow. I hate that time of day.
Lacey curtains on the rest are stained yellow to match the walls and ceiling with
years of smoking. Everything's yellow. A cluster of brown
blemishes amidst the cobwebs on the stucco-like ceiling baffles me...
how does someone spill coffee on a ceiling? A dusty lamp at my back illuminates a pile of small change I'm too lazy to put in the jar. The change has a coat of dust too. Above my father's chair hangs the lamp's distant ancestor; entombed in a
decorative orange prison thirty years its elder, an aging light-bulb begs to be turned on and put that much closer to its demise. The couch upon which I sit is a new guest in my home. An uninvited, but welcome guest.
Young, virgin - unfamiliar with someone of my experience. I'll break her in. A
scent of vanilla is in the air. Odd. Pleasant, to a point - mainly because I know its source is my pipe. I'm comforted by this.
Fireworks in the distance only intensify my feelings of solitude - common folk are off gazing at that which they've all seen before. The smart ones will make some real fun out of it. Such is life, I suppose: fucking or thinking about it. Writing about it makes me seem more pathetic. Depression sets in, bringing with it a need to numb my senses with intoxication. Am I a junkie? I feel like one. I feel like I'm trying to kill myself in the most cowardly way possible, and just beginning on the slow road to success. One thing I'm sure of is that when I die, the dust will cover me before anyone notices. Dust covers everything.
This is my living room, the name of which is contradictory with what goes on here.