I wonder if I can write a blog post by candlelight? That's what I'm doing right now. It's Wednesday night and I'm in my apartment
and I just finished dinner … and candlelight is so much more pleasant that the
overhead electric light that I'd rather not blow them out and reach for the
switch. There is still a little light in
the sky outside the window from a dim twilight, but not enough to do anything
by unless you can do it in the dark. It
would be fine for sitting outside with a glass of wine, for instance. My dining table is up against a big window,
and that's where I'm sitting right now as I write: somehow my desk is covered
with papers and I put my desk chair into storage to make room for the boys to
sleep in my living room over the summer.
It's a small apartment. They are
back at school but I haven't put everything to rights yet. I have great hopes for this weekend.
What's interesting is that I haven't even moved their
mattresses back into my bedroom yet. I
own two mattresses in all the world – I took these off the boys's bunk beds
when I moved out of the house, way back a year ago. During the year that followed, I stacked the
two of them together and slept on both when it was just me alone; I dragged one
into the living room when one boy or the other was with me; and I put the two
side-by-side when it was me and Debbie.
But all summer long, now, I let the boys have the two mattresses in the
living room, while I slept on the floor in the bedroom. Fair enough, you do what you have to do …
only, I realize I've gotten into the habit of sleeping on the floor at this
point, and I'm not sure I want to go back to sleeping on a mattress or
two. I've even been thinking of ways I
could rearrange the furniture if I didn't have to leave floor-space for a bed:
maybe move the desk and filing cabinet back into the bedroom and buy some
honest-to-God living room furniture.
So then could I out-and-out get rid of the mattresses
altogether? (Or offer them to Wife,
which would be a dirty trick because I know she never gets rid of
anything?) Of course, it's just
wild-eyed dope-smoking at the moment; I've got lots of other things to do that
are a higher priority than to rearrange my apartment. And I'd better not get carried away. One way or another, I still have to be able
to provide the boys a place to sleep while they are here. What's more, before I consign myself to
sleeping on the floor permanently, I should consider the possibility that
somewhere down the line I might want to share my bed with somebody else. “Hey there, beautiful – why don't you throw
off your things off and curl up with me on the floor?” doesn't sound too sexy
to me. What do you think?
Partly it's a question of what I want my life to look like
in the long term, and I don't have a good picture in my mind yet. Some things I know. I want to be in a small space – even when I
walk down the street admiring other people's houses, I pause longer at the cute
little houses than at the extravagant big ones.
I don't want to own very much stuff, as a purely practical matter: I'm
not very good at taking care of stuff, so it's not fair for me to own a lot of
it and either have to take care of it or let it decay into rubble. I want to be able to use my space – and the
things in it – well. And I want
to be surrounded by art – art and other beautiful things. But this business of sleeping on the floor
kind of took me by surprise, so I don't know what I think of it yet. Also I haven't really settled in my mind the
sex question: I certainly believe (and I've told you often enough) that I don't
want a “romantic relationship” “right now”.
But I haven't given up any hope of sex, at any rate not if my fantasy
life is to be believed. I don't
masturbate nearly as often as I used to, but I find myself wishing that
I wanted to masturbate. And I still
fantasize about the sheer companionship side of a relationship, even if
I don't want all the baggage that goes with it (like having to compromise for
another real, live human being). So it's
a puzzle.
On the other hand, I don't have to solve all that
tonight. By now the sun has gone all the
way down, but the candlelight is still beautiful. And I've finished off the bottle of shiraz. Hmmm, I wonder if a little sherry would be
nice before bed? Or maybe I should just
drift off to sleep as-is ….
P.S.: As I mentioned,
I am writing this Wednesday night though I assume I will post it on
Thursday. What happened to Tuesday? Well, I spent Tuesday night writing a blog
post for this social-media network they've installed at the office. Actually I wrote it straight through dinner,
eating with one hand while I typed with the other. If anybody else had been at the table with me
it would have been inexcusably rude; but as someone once wisely observed, “When
you live alone all your faults disappear.”
The punchline is that I realized in the morning it was a completely
stupid post. The other commentator I
thought I was correcting hadn't really said the inane things I attributed to
him, and all my brilliant insights were (by the light of day) only so many dull
and obvious platitudes. So I didn't post
it. Maybe I should post it here, both to
prove I was writing something last night and so you can laugh at me for how
pretentious I get with the wind in my sails.
(As if you didn't already know!)
Or maybe I won't. How about I
decide that tomorrow, when I'm sober (for a change) and while I'm posting this
one?
The sherry is very tasty, by the way. Sweet dreams, all ….
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