Chapter 50

50

I’ll be the first to admit it. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.

Unlike most people, I have four sides to my bed. A couple of years ago I opted to rid myself of a headboard and pull my mattress into the center of the room. I have no good reason for making my bed into an island, and in all actuality it’s more of a pain in the ass than anything else. While others have a headboard or wall to stop their pillows from falling to the floor, I lose mine over a dozen times a night. I’ve tried to buy more pillows to lessen the likelihood of finding myself pillow less at three in the morning, but the more pillows I add to the bed, the more they jump ship. This is mattress mutiny I tell you, and sooner or later they’ll make me walk the plank.

But I wasn’t talking about pillows. I was explaining the four sides of my bed and how they allow for more morning options. While other people wake up on either the right or wrong side of the bed, I wake up in several different ways that almost make the pillow problem worth it.

The right hand side of the bed, as Jamie would say, is my good side. However, I tend to disagree with that assessment. Just because my outer appears shiny and new doesn’t mean that my insides aren’t a little bitter. These days I can easily compare to menthol cigarettes. For example, you find yourself out of smokes in the middle of a nicotine convulsion. Walking by a coffee shop you notice a man smoking pleasantly out on the patio. You ask to bum a cigarette and he generously gives you one out of his pack. Paying no attention to the aroma you light it and take a drag only to find that this act of generosity is packed with menthol. Your insides sour and although you’re happy to be smoking, you’re secretly disgusted by the taste. That’s what the right side of the bed feels like to me.

The left hand side is completely awash with indifference, which I lovingly refer to as my “So-What” side of the bed. Getting up in this position means that thirty children could burn to death in a flaming bus crash and I’d still have a craving for ice cream.

The foot of my bed is where I find my truly happy days, although you wouldn’t know by looking at me. Foot of the bed days are full of introspection and are often filled with an eerie inner quiet where I may not speak more than ten words to anyone at all. These are the days when I get the most writing done and play games of chess alone. I live for these days because they don’t come around all that often.

Then there’s today’s side of the bed, the side of the bed in which you find worms in your bowl of cereal. The side of the bed where your first cup of coffee is cold and the last cigarette in your pack is broken in half. The side of the bed in which the woman sitting next to you on the bus can’t keep her fucking mouth shut and the chips in your chocolate chip cookies turn out to be raisins. You bought oatmeal raisin cookies at the store yesterday, Richard. No one likes raisins…especially you.

So without any coffee or cigarettes I stumble, half asleep, into the woods in search of inspiration. Wandering without purpose I head to the gulch, tossing those oatmealy cookies into the trees surrounding the well-worn trail. Cookie after cookie collides with the trees sending raisin shrapnel into the wilderness beyond. Perhaps those raisins will do some sort of good, sprouting raisin trees that will grow up to make some sort of pruny home from some sort of raisin loving bird.

The gulch, upon my arrival, is a desolate librarical carving into stone. The shelves, normally littered with books, are entirely devoid of literature. Replacing these works of art are thousands of volumes of cartoons pulled from the pages of such magazines as The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest. These cartoons aren’t funny by any stretch of the imagination. Its as if the person writing the caption under the drawing is actually looking at a picture of a three-legged cow instead of the cartoon that appears in print. In one particularly bad bit of humor, a man at a desk in a business suit is talking to his attractive secretary who is holding a pen and paper in her hands. Behind the executive is a window washer who is perilously close to falling off the scaffolding outside. The caption below this picture reads: “Samantha, take a memo. We will no longer be serving teeter-tots in the cafeteria.” Seriously, is this supposed to be funny?

So instead of grabbing a copy of this bit of uninspired stupidity, I snatch up a world atlas of wine and head to my usual writing desk. Only, instead of finding my desk in its rightful place in front of the “B’s”, I almost walk right into a giant opening in the Earth the size of a manhole.

If there were anyone around to query, I’d ask him or her some simple questions like:

“When did this hole get here?” or
“What the hell happened to my desk?” or
“Would you like my last oatmeal raisin cookie?”

But there isn’t anyone to talk to here, not today, so these questions are just as hollow as this gaping hole were my desk used to be.

I pull out the last oatmeal raisin cookie and toss it into the hole wondering if I’d quit having these sorts of days if I’d simply push the head of my bed back up against the wall. That would certainly end the mutiny, which would be a downright shame.