Taking Stock (Originally Published 28 Jan 2009)

Current mood:restless

 

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I am sitting in my bedroom on my Morris chair, my forty-pound lappy is on my seventies, dark green, pleather ottoman because, were I to put it on my lap, it would break my legs.  Outside, just beyond the windowpanes, the day is miserable.  Completely.  It had snowed overnight and then turned to sleet and then rain by early this morning. Fog has now developed and the impenetrable mist obscures my usual ocean views.  I hear the drops of water from the melting snow on the roof hitting my window jamb.  It wants to lull me back to sleep with its rhythmic tapping but I can’t.  I can’t go back to my dreams, they have been disrupting my nocturnal habit with their bizarre images.  My dreams are haunting me, giving me Technicolor visions that make no sense yet, make the utmost sense.  

I have been up since seven o’clock, woken by those same images and I threw back on the clothes that I wore yesterday that were on the chair that I am sitting on at the moment.  Clothes I have had on since Saturday night when I went to work.  I walked through the drizzle and three inch white slush to Brittany’s Café for my breakfast.  The officers from the police and fire squads were there at the counter and I took my seat at the table under the stairs, my favourite spot.  The waitress, in her C.O.C.K.S. hoodie (some college team), took my order and I sipped my coffee and tomato juice that she had already brought to my table as I sat down.  I finished my morning meal and got up, paid, overtipped and walked down through the slush, as if God spilled a big white Slurpee all over Atlantic City, to the flower shop.  I didn’t stay long, my mind has been wandering, distracted, beguiled and I needed to be…not there.  I threw on my dark green, knee length raincoat, I walked out into the gathering fog, my green Smithsonian umbrella now an annoyance at my side as the rain had stopped and I had no need for it anymore.  I got back to my flat and it wasn’t even nine o’clock, most people haven’t started their day yet and I was on my way home.  

And not after a night out on the town having the time of my life.  Or meeting the man of my dreams.  Or coming back from an extended European trip.  I was simply…sadly…going home to sit in my little room.  

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Alone.  

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I put on the television and the stereo, which is connected, and turned on the small heater to dry my now soaking wet black Polo’s and sat in bed, grabbed the remote and clicked play to watch…to watch…oh, I can’t even type the next words.  

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I watched romantic comedies.

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Romantic comedies from the eighties, no less.  

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My life has been reduced to this.  I guess it’s a residual element from the other night.  I am watching the Hollywood version of real life, those little “meet cute”, “break-up cute” and “get back together cute” movies that I absolutely bloody hate with every fiber of my being.  Mostly because they fill your head with the unnatural idea that the world is actually fair, something I have learned is a colossal untruth a LONG time ago.  

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Although now, I can’t seem to get enough of these little fantasies.  I need to submerge myself in the lie that my life will come together and end “happily ever after” or something close.  

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Oh, it won’t.  Of that, I am supremely positive.

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There is no way in hell that the gods will decree me some tiny bit of happiness.  My life is too full of drama, a farce that the Fates have woven to perfection on the day of my birth.  I am only enacting the scenes of mirth and tragedy (or is it, mirth through the tragedy?) that is my life, scenes that are sewn into the tapestry that only those fortunate goddesses are privy to.  I am trapped by this fate and I am accustomed to having to live this life.  

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I also know that if my life were to be boring, I would be hell-bent on fucking it up.  Just for kicks, if nothing else.

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So here I sit, on my Morris chair, in my well worn clothes, watching these dreadful movies, typing on my forty-pound Lappy and thinking of Monday night.  

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Monday night, which has invaded my dreams.  Which has invaded my days.  A day which the Fates have sewn so expertly, so comically.  

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Just for kicks, if nothing else.  

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Love.  I hate it.    

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Tonight we have a poetry slam at the Westside.  It should be an interesting occasion.  See you there.