A man walks into an apartment; he had just come back from a concert. He had gone to see an interpretation of Mozart’s Requiem by a local orchestra and choir. Puts his keys on a table by the door and feels his way through the dark hall way, to find a light switch, eventually finds it. He usually drops some photo frames his brother’s wife carefully positions on her tea table, but not this time – this time he was paying attention, not being his clumsy self. The requiem had always given him a sense of purpose what the purpose was – who knows. But he had managed to memorize every note of the requiem throughout years and took pride in criticizing and comparing its many interpretations. Tonight’s interpretation was too fast and the chorus wasn’t particularly impressive and the conductor didn’t seem to have the upper hand- all of which resulted in a shabby performance. He took pride in presenting his condescending critique, even though no one was listening.
He sat down on a leather couch, and a cold chill rose from the fabric up his spine. The house was freezing. His brother had taken his family to
He hates his brother’s house. It was too cluttered with matching objects, he always found matching things to be sinister. Like a presidential candidate dressing up his family to the color of his tie and giving the world an all American smile. So fake…that was his brother’s wife and her silly taste. He felt she was there, hiding behind all these objects, participating in some elaborate joke that could only appeal to her. She even got his brother to dress up in similar colors to her and wear those stupid shorts that silly tourists wear. She had turned him into a stereotype on a leash.
There was hope however. His brother recently took up writing again…he fixed up a room in the basement and made it his study. There his true colors came out. The silliness of his home stopped there. Suddenly you found yourself in a warm coherent room that collects your scattered thoughts and feelings and thrusts them back inside of you. Feels like home, like my father’s chair could fit there and didn’t have to adhere to the matching frenzy that was happening in the rest of this damned house.
Why am I still sitting in the living room? He wondered to himself, but didn’t have the energy to move to the basement. Maybe he didn’t want to intrude or maybe he was scared the room wasn’t there anymore. So many beautiful things had disappeared from his life and now it seemed that this room contained all this lost beauty, he just couldn’t afford to loose anymore. So, he stayed there on the cold leather couch, holding on to it and hoping that his body would manage to warm a patch, where he was now sitting. He decided to stay a little longer.
He had nowhere to go, anyway, and no one to see. His weekends have turned to be a constant longing to go back into the office. The office kept him busy; the company paid him to stop falling into his increasingly more acute condition. His rationale was: At the end of the day it was for the good of the company and the company fed so many people, so it must be good to serve the company in the best way possible. He took pride in this noble thought.
But his condition, this condition that he didn’t like to think about or talk of, was getting worse as we spoke. The man was once strong, intelligent & sensitive, the three key attributes of a perfect man and a perfect dog alike. He was getting older, now there is good old and bad old, wise old and dry old, he was of the less desirable type.
What remains from his intelligence was property of his company, who would squeeze every drop of it, naturally, because they’ve paid for it and will thus need to maximize their efficiency. Briefly, his intelligence got tangled (some years ago) in the web of tedious and repetitive corporate thinking. But he was a good employee; actually he was the best the firm has got. He had character that is of course in relation to his colleagues. But how couldn’t he have character? This man was an athlete, a musician, had his attempts at poetry to name a few. He was obviously going to have more character than the others, who just managed to listen well when their parents told them at the age of five that they had to be something and did just that – with no reconsideration or remorse.
This man sitting in this cold apartment is a hero! And he was living out his Karma on a cold leather couch…
He still sat there, looking aimlessly at the wall. Blank. He was getting a little warmer, and maybe if he got a little warmer we could start seeing some signs of life. But for now he just sat there blank…and blinking. He wanted to have a piss, and had to get up, the unexpected was happening.
He got off the couch with great difficulty and when he stood up he must have vertigo because he swayed a little before getting his balance back. Walked through the hall, into the toilet, raised the toilet seat and began his long release of urea and uric acid combined. What a thrill! He hadn’t seen this in years, there was smoke coming out of the toilet. He remembered when he was a little child and used to love pissing in the snow. That was the best; it made a yellow patch and eventually a hole and plenty of smoke would rise from the scene of the crime. How exhilarating for a child, this was better than trying to find Jesus inside your heart; at least you could see the smoke.
He zipped up and walked towards the mirror, not to wash his hands, he wasn’t accustomed to that. He reserved the hand washing ritual for more critical instances. He stood in front of the mirror, and looked at himself not very long before he compulsively started doing faces. He did every kind of face he wanted to do and then it moved into sounds as well, this was an audio visual spectacle of the highest regard. At the peak of his excitement he decided to take all his clothes off.
He loved being in the toilet, in fact he even forgot about the room in the basement and all the secrets it held. The toilet was his stage and our hero aims to please. He needs an instrument…remembers there’s a guitar in the living room, he storms out. The Strings were rusty and it was padded with dust, but it would do the trick. He picked up a bottle of whiskey on his way back from the bar and a few candles and came back into the toilet.
He was spending the night here. He had done this many times before, during his teenage days his toilet concerts had become so famous, neighbors would eagerly await them and some would join in on songs. This toilet star was ready to shine once more…
After exhausting himself for a couple of hours. He realized that no one had showed up to his concert and it’s a real shame, all this music floating into the cosmos before another human ear could suck at its juicy interiors.
….Remembers this girl from work, she’d been making her mating intentions clear for him for some time now. Calls her, she immediately agrees to join. She arrived not more than 5 minutes from when he called. It was as if she was sitting there - on her cold bed all night, dressed up and waiting for her man.
Instantly, she picked up on his mood and found herself naked in a stranger’s living room. Ready to take part in everything this shaman prescribed. He poured whiskey on her and asked her to get ready for the dance…he had now constructed a ring of fire on the living room floor made of the scattered candles that had previously lit the stage in his toilet concert. He put on a pharaoh sanders record, “black unity”, and started watching this beast unleash her yearning. He now sat back in the couch, no longer cold; the warmth from his body provided him with all the necessary insulation he needed to be a witness of this sacred ritual.
This dance was like no other dance he had seen. She stamped her heels in the floor, waved her arms frantically and her hair was like lava making its way out of the mouth of a volcano. The smell of her perspiration blended nicely with the whiskey in his glass and the pot pouri in the living had been put to sleep. He hated pot pouri, and loved what he was seeing… To heighten his sensation and the dramatic effect of this scene he sparked up a cigarette. Smoke rises into the air above him…
They danced and made love in no particular order and not abiding by any known conventions. All the matching objects were now rendered harmless, as they got tossed on the floor every time the shaman flung a table cloth in his search for new worlds. He was nothing less than Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake in his lust for exploration. He tried limiting himself to the discovery the female body and its array of textural sensations…
When the dance was over, the house, as you would expect, was in such a state. Most of the furniture was overturned, 2 carpets and a couch burnt by cigarette butts, wax covering the floor and table tops, accompanied by piles of semen stained napkins - the place was a mess. He stood there admiring his brother’s house, and for the first time he felt the place was glowing. He closed his eyes to try to retain a mental picture of the place, a place that could never go back to what it was. Where tonight’s ritual had altered its given dimensions making room for the grotesque the obscene and definitely the non-matching. Naturally the descriptions used here are those used by polite society, there is nothing obscene about what happened tonight…only natural, organic in its true sense – not of the variety that is nicely wrapped and expensive.
The hero, had no intention of cleaning up the place, he wanted his brother to see this. He had no remorse, only hope of a better life for his brother, and even maybe a heart attack from his brother’s wife would balance things out. But the hero is not a malicious man, just a man who’s lost something and trying to find it again, surely that is excusable.
He walks to the door, turns of the light, and makes sure he locks up afterward.
