Notes From the Underground

I’ve spent more time in this basement then anybody else! And it’s not a bad basement by any means- not the dank root cellar variety smelling of something musty and vaguely ominous- no, not that at all. This particular basement is new, completely done up with a pool table, large screen television, fully stocked bar, a jukebox, our G5, a bathroom w/shower and adjoining bedroom with a queen size bed. Oh, and there’s an exercise room down here, too. I just got off the treadmill where I was dancing (you should see me shake it!) and walking at the same time. I am this basements overseer. Should a pillow stray from off the couch, I’ll pick it up and refold the afghans while I’m at it.

Down here I’m mourning the losses of Spalding Gray (he seemed too avuncular to ever even contemplate suicide) and Spain, reading Joseph J. Ellis’s eloquently succinct Founding Brothers, thinking about country music and spending way too much time on LimeWire hoping to score Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer B-Side, Don’t Break This Rhythm. There are occasional trips upstairs to eat oranges.

It’s cold down here because despite the many amenities there’s only one heating duct in the large room where I spend most of my waking hours. That is, when I’m not in the city searching through over priced properties for hints of home or browsing the local Barnes and Noble while narcissistically admiring my fancy for both graphic novels and the complete short fiction works of Nabokov.

What I want is a job. I want a copy of Iron and Wine’s forthcoming sophomore release Our Endless Numbered Days, for gays to have the right to marry, for George Bush to take a flying leap, to talk to my Dad again about old movies and pragmatism, to sing vapid lyrics with complete conviction, to eat turkey-loaf by candlelight with my wife, to go back in a time machine and see Marvin Gaye in concert, to read faster and more and retain multitudes and lastly, to remove my presence from this basement. We’ve had enough each other.

So it goes.