floorpie

Sometimes I wonder what I might look like to the outside world. If my apartment was replete with cameras like the Big Brother house, what would they see? Me on my couch a lot, I suspect. The TV often on but not usually watched.

There would be a time-lapse of me laying on my left side, then my right, then moving to the floor, the couch as a back-rest, then back up again. The light would change as the sun sank lower in the sky. I’d disappear periodically into the kitchen or bathroom. You’d see my laptop come in and out. Books do the same. A guitar or two, my sketchbooks, maybe a pile of laundry every now and again. I’d text someone from time to time, check my email on my other phone…and that would be about my day.

I’m not sure why I spend my weekends like this, on average. I suspect that it has a lot to do with being so active during the week…I just want the time to decompress.

Or I’m destined to be the unabomber, who can say for sure?

***Dear Federal Government,

I was being sarcastic when I mentioned being destined to be the unabomber. It was my humorous, though unreasonable, extrapolation of the effects of my self-imposed solitude. I do not, in reality, have a hateful or violent bone in my body.

Except towards the people in Jersey Shore. I mean, have you seen that shit?!***

Throwing away dishes because you feel that you can’t be bothered to clean them isn’t smart, I know…but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel decadent.

I keep a list of all the books I’ve read. Did you know that? I’m sure you didn’t. I started it, I don’t know how many years ago, to prevent me from re-buying a book I’d already before, just to get a dozen pages in or so and say, “Waiiiit a minute…”. Having done this on a couple of occasions in the past, you see.

Peculiar, as I usually read a dozen or so pages in before deciding whether a book will catch my interest. Nevertheless, I still slip from time to time.

At any rate, I started the list, ostensibly as a reality check and secondarily out of pure, raw curiosity. To do so, of course, I had to go back and think about every book I’d ever read from time immemorial. This was, to be sure, a daunting task, although fun. I don’t remember if I started the list while I was visiting my parents, or if I did so soon after, but being in the East Coast re-imagining of my long-abandoned West Coast room, my books and things lining the shelves, helped a lot. I could simply look up and start typing.

It occurs to me, incidentally, as odd that my parents had decided to try and re-create my high school room when they had left me to my college on the West Coast to move to the East Coast. I would never live in that house, and it might as well have been the guest room it’s since turned into. Did they do that for me, I wonder, thinking that it would somehow give me a sense of permanency and home (when in fact, I’ve never had a sense of home, having grown up in the military…this is not a complaint, just an observation)? Or did they do it for themselves, their only living child having left the nest and that nest having been soon dismantled by a move across the continent. That’s a lot of change in a short amount of time. I’ll have to think about this more someday.

But the books. Only novels (I decided). It somehow wasn’t noteworthy enough to me to include children’s books. I wanted only to account for books. Save for the books left on my parents’ shelves, and the ones I would read in the future, everything else had to be done by memory.

I’m sure I missed a lot.

At current count I’m at 245. Which accounts, exactly actually, for 7 books per year of my life. Of course, I couldn’t read when I was 1, and probably didn’t start reading actual novels until I was…12? Let’s pretend 12. In that case, that’s 10 and change books a year every year for the past 20+ years. Is that a lot? A book a month and time off for good behavior?

In truth, I expected more.

In truth, it probably is more, I just can’t remember them all.

I attribute, it should be noted, any measure of my own intelligence to reading a lot. “Obviously,” you might say “you remember the facts you read and that passes as intelligence.” But that’s not what I mean. I think the act of reading itself, the pure mechanics of it, helped develop my brain and made it…smart. Such as it is. It’s not as if I remember most of those 245 books. I couldn’t tell you the main characters of the bulk of them, and the plots of all but the most recent would be completely beyond my ability to relate to you. I just don’t have that kind of memory (or don’t care to remember things like that?). So it’s not as if by reading, I’ve absorbed a ton of facts or anecdotes to spit out later at dinner parties.

Instead, it’s just the reading, whatever it may be, that produced a fairly nimble mind in my humble opinion. Should I ever have legitimate children, they’re going to be reading as soon as they’re able. Possibly sooner.

Being a single guy who lives sans roommates, I spend a lot of time alone. While this would otherwise be a depressing statement I’ve recently realized that I seek out the solitude from time to time. As much as I go out, which is a lot, I also purposely avoid going out to be…alone? I guess so, as odd as it seems. I go outside to get some air and walk away from people that I see in the distance. Stand in the shadows that the street lights create with the palm trees. Skulk around the neighborhood quietly and alone.

Why is that?

I sometimes think that it’s compensation for the many other times when I endeavor to be the center of attention…either purposefully or by imagined obligation.

When I was but a young lad, my mom had (and probably still has) a hand vibrator…and through the wonders of the internets I found a picture of one. As you can see, it’s an evil looking device that belies is singular function. It looks like it should control a robot or shoot flames or at least do something highly technical and mechanized.

Instead, it just sits there and vibrates at you.

See that little metal switch on the right? You’d throw the switch and the motor would kick into life with a loud electric crack. If you hadn’t already strapped it to your hand (via those metal springs at the bottom) then it was impossible to hold on to and only unplugging it would stop the madness.

I can’t imagine that this thing could be used in any kind of sexual way…the vibrations were too violent, the thing was heavy, and your hand was wrapped in moving metal. Instead, this thing was a massager in the truest sense of the word and my mom would use it to gently rub my head whenever I had a headache, which, in retrospect, was pretty often.

You couldn’t use the thing for more than 10 minutes before your whole arm was buzzing and you had to take a break, though. Which is why I’m glad my mom got me this much evolved wand vibrator…undoubtedly used as a sex toy, friendly plastic body, and no shooting flames or evil intent within it.

Today, it being the first of the year, and last night being what it was, it’s again being used to relieve a headache…though I suspect the cause is different than it was when I was 6.