It’s happening again, that edgy winter feeling. Now that the holidays have passed and Valentine’s Day is approaching, I find myself growing a bit punch drunk, a kid who has stayed up too late and perhaps had a few too many sips of the grown-up’s champagne. I’m also doing those awful obsessive things like burning a CD for a friend or relative and if it’s not totally, unbelievably, tonally, unequivocally perfect then I need to start all over again.
This means that there are many CDs floating around my study that look blank, but that are not, that are all sort of or essentially the same but have one or two songs slightly different and perhaps even by the same artist, or even the same songs but in a different arrangement. So that’s one thing. I’ve been making a CD for my cousin for over a week now, and so far it has become 2 CDs and today in a fit of madness, I thought, "Eureka! I can’t fit it all onto one disc, so I’ll make him a 3-CD Sadi Mix Set (he’ll be thrilled, I’m sure)!" This is obsessive behavior.
Then there is the bleaching. It starts slowly, so you hardly notice. You clean the kitchen sink out one night and it comes up shiny and silver again. Wow! Or, you take a shower and want to wipe the tub and there is the container of Soft Scrub or Bon Ami right there and so you pick it up, shake out the bluish white nectar, and the fumes waft to your nose and you start to scrub the bottom of the bathtub, which, now that you’re doing it, you notice is disgustingly filthy.
You then get out of your clothes and sit or squat full-nude in the shower, with the water dribbling enough to dampen your scouring pad but not so much that it splashes on you (never mind that your feet are sitting in two inches of what is essentially raw bleach; that seems to not bother you.) All this, then it is the kitchen countertops which are either bleached or painted or both (and white is the only acceptable color besides a very specific katydid green that is so pale that it is almost white but not quite and if other people can’t tell the difference then fuck’em because you can.)
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