(no subject)

I have a pretty good memory. When I was a boy, just a young one, I used to have to sit up late with my mother copying verses out of the bible. Then I'd have to memorize them. My memory is good, so I remember this pretty clearly as having involved quite a lot of crying and slapping. Anyway - it worked pretty well though because - again - I have a pretty good memory. Also an understanding that valuable learning is gained through privation and pain.

I remember the room of the house where I learned those lessons. The dining room - which was used on Sundays and birthdays and holidays - basically the days that my father was home from work to eat with us. Patterned shag carpeting, textured really, a bronze/tan color. Cherry table, always with a lace tablecloth - matching lace curtain on the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. Really that lace curtain was my nemesis in life.

Once my mom and dad and sister, I think my brother was born then, but he was so small - I didn't really ever understand about having a brother until I was about ten. But we were all outside and I crept away and went into the house. I had this idea that I'd lock everyone out and then it would be my house. I was really successful at it too. Now as a parent I wonder what I'd think if I was banging on the doors and windows trying to get into my house and my kid just stared at me from the other side of the plate glass with (what I can only assume) was an expression of anxious defiance. Anyway - mom borrowed the neighbor's ladder and got up on the balcony before I could figure out what was happening. She got the sliding glass door open while I struggled in the lace curtain - netted like a fish. And landed just as easily. I think she was just astonished. I remember pretty clearly getting a whipping, but I also remember her face - bewildered is the word.

Later I could never sleep. That's a problem that I kept up for a long time. Laying in bed, I was just a kid, I couldn't ever get to sleep. It went away I think - exactly when I started being comfortable in my own house? I think that's when. Anyway I can't get enough sleep anymore and I fall asleep right when my pillow hits me in the head these days - but when I couldn't sleep I made this game - I used to try and remember every room I'd ever been in. I can still think of some - main rooms, kind of important ones. My Kindergarten classroom stands out as having a long usefulness. I'm one of those people who always had trouble with right and left - but in Kindergarten the teacher had a red hand silhouette on the right side of the room and a green one on the left - divided up by the 26 letter people. Whenever I was trying, for a long time, to remember right and left I'd superimpose my memory of that room on the situation. So wherever I was - being stymied by right and left as concepts - I'd also be back in that room.

Others had less value. I remember all the churches I've been in but not much of what was said in them. I remember being hot or cold and bored. I remember the rooms my friends have lived in. Once I went to a party and this girl, who threw it - she lived in a house where friends of mine, years before had lived - strange - to see that room done up a different way - used a new way. It was the same house - not the same room.

But I have - opinions about rooms now. Maybe as a result of that game? Maybe just because I've spent so much time in them. Rooms you know. Sometimes. Sometimes they mean a useful thing without actually having any form that defines that role. Where I sleep now - for instance - that room is not a good room. It's just a place, but it's the place I sleep - I don't know, I've imprinted it. I spend a goodly amount of time there, a lot of time as the rest of the rooms of my house have been shut off from me - but there's a place that is for me, and that is something - except that there's not a mark in it that makes it seem mine. Not in a real way. Rooms - you know they can be elaborately fashioned to a single purpose and that's maybe ideal. Maybe that's what we want from a room. Maybe we have so many because it's so hard to make each room bear so many burdens? There's more to it, I'm sure there is.


Now, I know I've had a correct day if I've spent enough of it outside of a room. Any room, outside, in the sun, under the weather. That's the thing to do - go and do- rooms aren't for doing, they're for hiding in. That's what I'm concluding. I was a little boy and tried to lock my family out of my house - tried to hide from my shark-toothed predator parents. I go to my room now it's to hide from my dangerously dissatisfied roommates. I go to school and it's to hide from work or the weird expectations that come with working. I go to a room and it doesn't make me feel better - it doesn't serve any function that's useful to me except for cover. Ersatz. It's when you don't need to be in a room - don't need to hide from the elements or the dangerous threatening ferocity of the marketplace that you're liberated and free. I locked my family out of the house - but I should've run away. That's what I'm learning you understand. Confinement - it's that tribe of bunnies in Watership Down - who grow to become extravagantly nihilistic in exchange for cover - no longer afraid of the elements they embrace the rule of death - ugly stuff. Anyway - yes, predation, weather, danger - the room guards you against those things.

Not well. Just enough.
So I'm saying that I don't believe in places anymore. I've seen enough fallen ones to know that they can't last - they all buckle and crumble under the sky's relentless attack. They grow weird stalactites and their roofs cave in and the fallen ceilings make carpets of muck and moss and rubble. The windows make a carpet of broken glass and the doors, if you're lucky, make a pathway through all that - they're not rooms anymore then - they're landscapes - they're the end of the manifold, unrealized purpose of the room - to provide scanty cover from predation - turned into hazards themselves. Nature subverts the tawdry hopes of people to subvert its menace. That's rewarding, that's meritorious to have seen and learned. It's worth remembering.


I have this joke about bathrooms. Whenever I go into someone's bathroom I come out and say: "I love that picture of the handsome man you have! I mean, I'm not into dudes, but that's a really handsome man. Where'd you get that picture?" Sometimes they'll even get confused enough to go and look for the picture themselves. Funny stuff.