Moving a Ten Dollar Bed

Despite spending most of the weekend doing some of my favourite things–blogging, reading and sinking deep into a vat of CDs and mp3s–I ended my days off feeling frazzled. Forty-eight hours of continuous drizzle and cold weather meant that the dogs and I were pretty much suffering from cabin fever by this morning, and I was quite please to return to the structure and modest tyrannies of work.

Having said that, writing every day has meant that the first part of this year seems to have passed rather more meaningfully than before. It has heightened my awareness of how I move through each day and made mindlessness, or its cousin, anxiety, rather more difficult. If I say that it’s sharpened my mind, I mean in a selective sort of way, in that I am much better than I used to be at electing not to pay attention to certain things, attitudes and opinions as much as tangible phenomena.

I have my study at home set up in what would otherwise be a small spare bedroom, on the south side of the house. It is a reasonably cramped space once both the dogs are spread out on the floor, and relatively isolated from the rest of the house (although since I dwell in a reasonably compact space for the number of rooms, genuine isolation isn’t really possible). But the combination of being on the cold side of the house, in a small room and living with two dogs who like to follow the sun means I’ve decided to swap around the study and the spare room. This decision dovetailed rather well with coming home from work tonight feeling buzzy-in-a-bad-way from a late coffee and a meeting as well as still out of sorts from the weekend. I spent much of this evening unloading, shifting and reloading bookshelves as well as trying to get the spare bed out of one room and into the other, the latter to no avail. Mind over basic maths didn’t work in this case, as the headboard was too wide to get through the doorway of origin. At one point I had the head of the bed jammed in the spare room’s doorway and the foot jammed in the entrance to the bathroom, with me on one side and Millie on the other. I contemplated briefly getting the stool from the living room and climbing over the stuck bed in a doggie rescue mission, but thought the drama might be just a bit high and managed to work the bed back whence it came.

The spare bed is also my childhood bed, and indeed was for a time my adult bed. It never occurred to me that I might want a double bed until I moved into my first flat, when my single bed shamed out at least one of my flatmates, as it continued to do in my second flat. It was as if, by owning a bed built for one, I had hung a permanent sign on the door declaring an intention not to have sex, and my counter-assertions that two could sail perfectly content in a small boat, if the need arose, were of no use in pleading my case for social respectability.

Before it was my bed it was my father’s, and bought by him second hand. When I tipped it up this evening I could see “Northlands, $9.90″ in pencil on the base. Until now I was unaware I had spent the greater part of my sleeping life on a ten dollar bed. By the least scientific (but still vesitigially accurate) reasoning possible, based on cost but not allowing for inflation, my current bed should therefore be eight thousand percent more comfortable than its predecessor, which it isn’t.

I spent the second part of this evening watching the first episode of the new season of The Sopranos. I have Dangermouse to thank for increasing my appreciation of this series, although I don’t think my enthusiasm for it will ever quite equal his. It is one of the few dramas on TV where the characters function as protagonists and antagonists in the manner of more traditional theatre, rather than being types manipulated by scriptwriters to evoke strong but ultimately shallow feelings of sympathy or dislike. Watching the actors work in The Sopranos is as compelling as the stories themselves, as is enjoying the use of camera angles, colouring, light and shade to tell the story. There have been enough seasons that the narrative’s tragic drive has a gravity about it now that’s almost funereal–almost, but not quite.

This morning I found in my car my copy of The White Stripes which I’d forgotten to bring inside earlier. It was just the thing to shake off some of that cabin fever. Shouting along to “Jimmy the Exploder” was one of the few occasions on which I’ve wished that my four kilometre commute was longer (not least after reading Aldahlia’s recent remark that she spends three to four hours a day getting to and from work). There’s something about listening to music in the car that’s better even than listening to it in the house. You can have it as loud as you like, so long as you’re rolling, without worrying about bothering anyone, and the enclosed space puts you in the midst of it in a way that makes up for the disappearance of the bass-end of the sound into the general noise of the engine.

In the days when I ran a 1979 Mini, it was more a case of the disappearance of most of the sound into the general noise of the engine, but that made it all the better to drive to the top of a hill and listen to Brothers in Arms while surveying the view before me. Funny how in ten years I’ve shifted from MOR classics to punk-inflected blues, rather than the other way round. Heh, fine by me, especially in these last two weeks before the prep course exams begin, when steam is inclined to build up on all sides.

Now Jimmy
Well, do you want an explosion now?
Yeah Jimmy
Do you want to explode now?

Yeah monkey
Now you seeing red now
Yeah monkey
Jumping on the bed now

Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo Source

Lest I retreat entirely to a pre-verbal state, let me throw in this snippet of early James K. Baxter (the original Jimmy the Exploder, no?), from the first issue of Landfall which I was going over with my students today, explaining to them how publication in a literary journal (especially a small regional one) can be a testing ground for what will later make it into a published collection and what will be left out. It’s just my feeling that only the then-twenty one year old wunderkind of New Zealand poetry could have got away with writing this:

To a Poplar Tree

Trees move me as no man or animal.
Green and young like a girl of air
where the wide hills lean to the sun;
and cloudy winds fall
with Spring to stone mounds and a brown river. (1-5)