keeping up
Thursday, July 1st, 2010I say I’m trying to stop wasting time on the internet, by which I mean wandering Wikipedia, or ED, or TVTropes, or 4chan, or CollegeHumor, or any of those sites that I could easily spend an indefinite amount of time perusing. I say I’m trying to find something more worthwhile to occupy my time - that if I’m going to be an insomniac, or whatever, I’m at least going to use those waking hours to better myself.
Well, Wikipedia and TVTropes probably alright fit that requirement, but not the others. And I still spend time on them, though I have been reading more lately, and it feels good. It feels like the old days, when I would read an installment of Redwall or Pern cover-to-cover, curled up on the carpet, surrounded by my quilt, propping myself up on pillow, enduring decidedly uncomfortable postures in the interest of continuing the story. It occurs to me that perhaps associating hard surfaces on which to recline with intellectual (and perhaps a bit devious, given the early hour of my supposed bedtime) pleasure lead me to my professed prefresence for harder bedding now, in my 20’s. Other people preach the virtue of the box spring, the space-age memory foam pillow top mattress, they search for their ’sleep number.’ I flop down on my futon, not to firm and not too squishy, settling into the canyon that my body has gradually pressed into the material, slightly form-fitting as I roll back and forth, starting out on my chest, then my side, then my other side, then my back - but usually waking on my back or chest, rarely on my side. I seem to settle on one or the other sometime during the night.
And making music just doesn’t see the same as it used to be. It’s refreshing to sit down at my new piano and play with chords, but I can sense that a lot of the practiced agility of my teenage years has fled - I just don’t think that way anymore. I could learn to again, no doubt, but it’s not an undertaken I’ve seen fit to pursue yet. I’ve considered it. I wonder whether acquiring long forgotten copies of elementary learning materials, for casual perusal, might help me ramp back up to where I was in highschool - looking eagerly over a piece of sheet music, subconsciously testing the fingerings against my palm, pretending to already catch a glimpse of the melody, when in fact that level of sheet-music reading was beyond me. I remember my fingers flipping over eachother like gymnasts, showing off in front of a crowd of peers and elders, seated beside a similarly talented performer, each of us playing our part, barely paying attention to the way the music must sound, totally focused on getting it right. Was that naive? Was it rote repetition, disciplined conversion of the body’s natural instinctive movement into measured machinery, clicking finger after finger as the notes flew up and down the staff, and behind my eyes, where I’d half memorized it already? Was it the thrill of the performance? Will I ever occupy that same space? Would I like to?
Music I miss in a kind of abstract way - I remember my joy in it, but there is no music-shaped-hole in my soul, so to speak. More and more, though, I feel flickers of literary ideas, small sparks dancing in my peripheral vision, characters, plotlines, nebbishes, attributes and elements. Magic blurs with programming, memory with fantasy, and I wonder (as if it matters) what would a story say about me? Is it all about me? I wonder whether authors who are successful breath life into their characters because they care about them - because to them, they are all real, the plot is a real problem, the consequences are something to be concerned about. I don’t think I make that connection with the protagonists I’ve thus-far devised, all my past efforts have been something more akin to flights of fancy, the pleasure of imagining ‘if it were like this, I would choose that,’ perhaps hoping to instruct everyone who reads it; ‘this is who I am.’
There are so many moths in my bedroom (abrupt changes of subject are attractive sometimes) and I wonder where they all come from - is there a thriving moth colony beneath the back deck, which sends these mostly sedentary members out as scouts, or settlers, or perhaps pariahs, banished from the land of the moths into the perpetual twilight of my bedroom, startled by the occasional bright lights, hiding for hours behind shelves before dive-bombing my glowing monitors when they are the room’s only light source? (was that really all one sentence?) They migrate in waves, and their presence creates a hidden-picture-like situation - earlier, I caught all three gathered around the exhaust fan on my computer tower, perhaps staring into the flickering blue LEDs. I tried to nab them with a clear glass and a stiff paper envelope, but they escaped, scattering - and now as I glance around, I see one by one lamp, another by another, and a third dissimilarly positioned low down on the outside wall, apparently uninterested in maintaining proximity to the electric lights. Now that I’ve marked their locations, I think I’ll take a quick break to relocate them, releasing them (as has been my habit with spiders as well) into the near-outdoors-ness of the attached garage. BRB.
Aside from a few tiny little fruit fly type things, or maybe an immature mosquito, I think that leaves me with my room insect-free - I need to be more careful about putting up the screen on the window when it’s nice and summery. Still, it makes me think, in the vein of life imitating art, that there’s a certain as-yet-unnamed character in a certain as-yet-unwritten story of mine that shares his life with insects in a bit of metaphor that I’ve yet to puzzle out. The bug bite boy, with spiders in his room, always finding a new little itchy bump or two somewhere on his skin, inflamed and un-poppable, unlike the occasion zit his adolescence has brought him. And yet despite the continued campaign of annoyance he’s suffered at the hands of the insects, he hasn’t developed a phobia, or a vendetta, or anything - he wonders at it. Why is he bitten? Am I that boy? I’ve been stung and bitten many times, sometimes covered in mosquito bites, sometimes the victm of a single terrible insect encounter - pre-pubescent summer camp memories include sitting on a bee-infested log and getting stung in the butt, while later as a teenager my scrotum somehow became the target of the big jaws of a large black ant - I screamed, my breath coming in gasps, panicked despite the lack of danger or even real pain, but scared at such a small unstoppable intruder’s unexpected appearance in such a delicate and private place - I hurriedly flicked it off, but this only detached its body, leaving its head stuck to my skin. Nightmarish. There are always spiders, Daddy Long Legs or beefier varieties with more impressive mandibles, working cobwebs into the corners of my bedroom. Did this insect omnipresence beget the bug bite boy?
Unlike a particular childhood friend, I’ve never been particularly bothered by spiders, or bugs in general - I only ask that they stay away from me. I don’t want them walking on me if I (or they) can help it, and I don’t want them in my way, partially, I have to admit, because I don’t want to inadvertently kill them. Is it hypocritical to use an empty glass to catch-and-release moths and mosquitohawks and at the same time continue to chow down on red meat? Empathy for bugs, but not for cows? It’s interesting to contemplate for a moment, but doesn’t really bother me. Maybe I’m too at peace with the way I am, but a little paradox is alright if it keeps me comfortable.