Life as metaphor // What's wrong with my room

LIFE AS METAPHOR

About half an hour ago, I was reading Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. This'll be the tenth novel I've read of his, and the tenth since September 2006. That's a lot of reading. The main character, Kafka Tamura, does a lot of reading, too. In a conversation with a librarian, Kafka states that he doesn't really know what he's gotten out of his reading, or why he likes an imperfect book more than a perfect book. The librarian eventually gets to a quote by Goethe: "Everything is a metaphor."

I don't know anything about goats, but I certainly don't know anything about Goethe. However, this Goethe knows something about life, just like el seÑor (I don't know the lowercase n-tilde. Okay, I could figure it out in 5 seconds, but I knew that one by heart, so whatever) Hussey knows something about a certain general philosophy of life. It's just true that random trivial shit (note how that phrase is both descriptive and vague at the same time) can help us make sense of our lives. And this time My Refrigerator was a metaphor.

Shit, I didn't even get that right. My Freezer was a metaphor. Now... Because I haven't done anything really productive for the past n days and because I've been staying up until 8 AM the past two nights, I decided to find something to do, and I realized I could do something that no human, no dinosaur has ever attempted: clean out my freezer. I didn't even really do that, because I have no clue what my mom, uncle, aunt, and grandmother actually use in there to cook. For all I know, they could use green peas from 1998 for antiquated value or something just like they do with wine. (Don't ever ask me to develop a taste for wine. You'd waste my time, and that's vowel rhyme, PUNK!) In any case, what I did is clean out the stuff on the door's shelves, and even wash two of the removable shelf thingies that I emptied with success. I moved the ice packs that I saw in the main section of the freezer to the shelves, and then I looked.

What I saw was that removing things from the confiture that was My Freezer actually led to the potential for things to slip out if you opened the door. When everything was stuffed in there, there was a delicate, not-supposed-to-be-there balance. Now, a big pile of old shit remains, old shit that I didn't get to cleaning out because I wanted to do this freewrite, and it's created this slope whereby new shit can fall out. (You notice how I'm writing this as if it were a textbook, with italics and everything? I should become a teacher and then go on to write real textbooks. Like, this is how people really write. We don't use inflated terms like "verisimilitude" or "eros"; you'd understand stuff like "old shit" or "hot shit" much better.) Yarr, that parenthetical expression was too long. (Also, yarr, not yaar. That's different.) But let's sum things up.

This freezer was wrong. It was just far too filled, and things needed to come out. That, of course, created the problem of the slippery slope. But should I regret beginning to clean out the freezer? Fuck no; this isn't the end of the story, and I can go on to finish cleaning when I feel like it. Here's how this is a metaphor. There are times in your life (and I should say in addition that there have been and will be times in my life) when you will have too much shit piled up in your life. You'll get used to it; there is a balance there. But it's either a painful one or just wrong. It shouldn't exist. The minute you remove shit, you might disrupt the balance. It gets increasingly difficult to remove more shit. But, yeah, but you've just gotta get rid of it.

There was a delicate balance to my uh stress-life at SJP. I know enough now to be wise and to say that it wasn't really all that good. You can say, "Sure, there was all the hard shit and shit, but it was good," but allow me to flip that around and say, "Sure, there was good shit, but there was a lot of hard shit." I did not like the atmosphere when I visited on Friday, December 15, and I'm probably not going to like it either on Tuesday, January 9.

But that doesn't mean I'm not going back. Good shit be there, too. I'm not throwing everything outta my freezer.

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WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY ROOM

My room is a dusty fuck-nut case. Rearrange those four words if you want, but overall you're not going to find real precision, and overall all you need to know is that I overall don't like it. My room is a nutty fuck-dust case. I hate it when I get there and dust-things start crawling up my nose, ears, the small spaces between my eyes and my eyelids, and other orifices north of my nipples. Man, I don't like sleeping there. It's just difficult. I can never bring myself to clean it, though. Something's wrong.

What's wrong is that my bed takes up about 70 percent of the ground space in my room, but that's looking at it from the cleaning perspective. I think something else is wrong, too. My roomy dusty fucky nutty case is. In other words, I don't know!!!

...what's wrong. Well, I don't know the whole story, to be more precise. I can beat into the heart of the matter, however.

Thrown upon my white wall at some point are some artifactoid things. Don't know if that word exists, but the suffix "toid" just has that kind of tone that overall bothers me, and so you can see that the fact that these things are in some way "artifacts" overall bothers me. That's too long. Of a sentence. Okay. The shit on my wall bothers me.

Imagine you're looking out my window, onto the street where we play frisbee at 3 AM. (Well, it's never gotten that late, but you have the feeling it might if we don't do something about it!) We have up on the left, up up up, a picture of me being pulled in a sled as a baby. Something's illogical about the sled. How on earth does sledding work if you're pulling someone down the hill? That's gravity's job, right? Well, whatever; that's just me being there as a kid, excited as ever about something that is logically unexciting. Snowy snow is there. Why don't we have some fucking snowy snow???? Anyway. That picture must've been there for ages, in its faded red frame, going unnoticed forever. Oh, don't be mistaken by my tense usage; it's still there. I've just gone back to not acknowledging it.

Also adoringly adorning my wall are a poster entitled "All About Me," which I made in 1st grade, but which Sister Theresa kind of messed around with when she replaced my submitted All About Me paper with another one; whatever; her directions weren't clear or something and so it's her handwriting, not mine, on the paper that's on that poster;; a multitude of baseball posters from the 1999 MLB All-Star Game Exposition;; a framed poster of our 2004 World Champion Red Sox featuring Mark Bellhorn;; an AREA-ONE concert poster (the only real concert I've ever been to) from July 2001;; I don't remember the rest.

Ugly cheap-feeling plaid curtains don't perform their job as shades for my window because I never need them to block out the sun, for that is what I do with my eyes when I sleep. Dust adorns my nut-colored cabinets and drawers and whatever they call the big things of which cabinets and drawers are a part. Oh, dressers. They're just complex cases. I have a plastic belt-rack whose name comes from its purpose but which only barely serves its purpose with the one belt I actually use. A dust-filtering thing that's never done much work sits upon one of my dressers. Bellhorn's not looking at it, but he might be looking up at my two hanging lamps, both of course dusty. A broken DO NOT ENTER sign sits in my opened, wide, opened-wide clothes closet. Steven and I used to play with that sign all the time when we were younger and pretend to be Power Rangers. You can see the names of two of them written in permanent marker atop the sign: "Billy and Tommy." I think I was always Tommy and he was always Billy, or something; whichever one was cooler and more forceful. Teddy bears and other stuffed non-taxidermic animals sit atop my tan-colored wooden bookshelf. Where bunnies become dust-bunnies. You can bet that any kid allowed to play with those things would be sent to the hospital right away with dust poisoning, if that even exists. My bed is covered in gleefully boring, passively masculine bedsheets. The floor is pathetic pink carpeting. It's pretty ugly. It amazes me how much I've been able to refrain from thinking about it, because it really is awful. It's the same color as the plexiglass stuff that's in our attic.

That's my room. You guys haven't seen (much of) it.

An aside (yeah, I know, the shit above sounds like an aside, but this is more of one)
One night, a few nights ago, I realized that I don't recall ever having seen the closet doors closed. So I tried to close them. IT DOESN'T WORK. You can connect that to what Goethe said. That might be dangerous, but remember what I said about My Freezer.

END ASIDE

What's wrong with my room. What's wrong with my room?

The wrong shit lies in the fact that I haven't decorated my room in the longest time. And I know I'm living most of my life in college from here on out for four years or eight years or whatever that truth is, but I feel like I really need to decorate my room. Not redecorate, decorate. That means a complete renewal. There's so many vestiges of my past (is that even the right word, "vestige"?) that this room just isn't what I want it to be. If it's something to live in, then I want it to be that. Let me look at all my old shit later, when I'm 65 or something! You know the guys who decorate their room with whatever bands or items or sluts that they were into at the time? Well, I've never been that guy, but it's time to bite the dust, or face it, or something, so that my room isn't the cased up fucked up dust-nut it's been for the past x years. Teddy bears, out. The teddy bears aren't even good ones; now Rajesh had some good teddy bears. He had good taste in those. Well, I didn't buy any, so those things must've been quick Christmas purchases, and boy it shows. Killers poster, in. You have no idea how good (some of) that album Sam's Town is. Shitty-looking 1999 All-Star Game Exposition (I mentioned this without explaining it and it's not worth explaining) poster, out. Illogical sledding picture, out. All About Me poster, out. Curtains, ......... do you think I'm a woman? Okay, if you think that I'm going to "hop over in my minivan" to Bed, Bath, Venus, and Beyond to "spruce up" my "chamber" then you just filed a request for your teeth to be punched in and subsequently pulled out. (Fuck, that sucked. I was never good at fightin' words.)

In the end, I realized that I need to redecorate my room. That's it. That's so simple, but I just had a lot of fun explaining how I got there. Unfortunately, I lack decoration supplies, so my room will remain a dust fuck nut casey-at-the-bat strikeout until morning. Check that: until afternoon.