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March 11, 2006

Bed

I lie in my bed. Pillow propped up against the head board, head propped up against the pillow. I fell alone and serene. The wind blowing outside along with the rattle of an empty can rolling down the street below. I look around at the room before me. The two black and white photos of Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog. They must be hanging there a good fourteen years. From when I was small. From a time when all I wanted was to be a puppeteer. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I remember how, being small, I would always look in the mirror and try to imagine myself older, in my twenties. I could never do it. I could never get my head round the concept of growing up. My days we’re spent playing spies and rounders and games we’d just invent ourselves. I look at the poster beside them. A huge image of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Jeff bought it for me on his birthday. He seen it somewhere and thought I’d like it. I was really pleased about it. How even though I’ve slight obsessive compulsive tendencies and don’t like putting posters up on my wall, I put this one up anyway. Because it didn’t signify whiskey more than it did a thought, a kindness, a spontaneous gesture.

I look further to a plywood board with a couple of photos tacked to it. One of me smiling as a baby with someone wriggling my toe. A photo of Lucky our little dog when he was sick. We laid a huge orange quilt for him on the kitchen floor to sleep on. Then onto the shelves and balancing towers of books upon them. Books I’d be given. Books I’d bought on the strength of their covers alone. Regretting doing so in some cases but delighting in most. My favourite books. The one’s I love to much to ever recommend to anyone else. Then to the books with inscriptions written in them. Some just a standard phrase or greeting from a tired author but others more special. More personal, from a friend. More kind gestures. The books written by friends. I chuckle a little. Thinking about the times when I bump into authors in Credit Union queues or out shopping or at the bar. I like it. I think of the people who have sent me books from another country. Books that crossed the Atlantic.

My eyes move down to the pipe I got in Slovenia one time and to the small tin of McCrystals’ Snuff resting beside it. The snuff was a present from a friend I know longer see. He remembered me talking about snuff one day and weeks later he saw some tins of it in a tobacco shop front in Clare. I look at the pile of DVD’s which I’ve stopped buying. How they represent almost nothing. They’re quantity illustrates a gap I was trying to fill, a gap that sometimes felt like an abyss. I look to the door which I’ve turned into a sort of ongoing collage. Some posters from a reading series me and a friend put together. Some postcards of Tintin and James Bond and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Alfred Hitchcock that my parents brought back to me once. A bright blue ticket I kept from a time when me and a comrade had gone to see Bret Easton Ellis. We stuck around until every last person was gone so we could talk to him alone.

Near the door handle a letter from a girl in San Francisco. I stuck the letter up because its one of the few letters I have that isn’t typed and whose penmanship is beautiful. To it’s left a package that arrived in the post one morning out of the blue. Instead of a regular envelope it was sent in one of those green and white envelopes you usually get when you collect you’re photos from the chemist. And it held a short story and some music. A most wonderful gesture. Looking closer now my, beside locker. The lamp shade titled slightly so the light spills over my bed for when I’m reading into the night. A stack of albums. Charlie Parker. Eels. The Magnetic Fields. Music is my tonic. Administered by dancing alone to it. No need to discuss it or analysis it for now. Just listen and dance to it. Stand alongside Brel, duet with Bobby Darwin, conduct the Tokyo Symphonic Orchestra, jam with the Blues Brothers. Below the CD’s are some freshly printed pages. Various collected blog’s of people that require further attention. Then back to the bed. Pillow propped up against the head board, head propped up against the pillow.

Downhill from here by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist

Posted by LiamG at March 11, 2006 10:22 PM