Here and Now

I should really open the window and air out all this cigarette and weed smoke. But this a/c is just barely combating the setting sunshine pouring through these dirty blindless windows. The big box fan humming away underneath my windowsill helps a bit, but I don't like the way it blows around these piles of books and papers littering my floor, or the Blackbeard flag hanging from the wall opposing me.
I should really get a chair. The way my back is resting on this under-inflated air-mattress that takes up a good forty percent of the room is less than pleasing, to say the least. But its such a pain in the ass trying to inflate this ungodly large bed (in an ungodly small room) with nothing but a manual bike pump. As I sit on the carpeted floor of my room, pecking away at my keyboard, I take a drink from an almost cold beer and replace on the floor beside me, my pipe, ashtray, cigarettes, lighter, and cellphone...the necessities. The beer helps to combat this humidity and stagnant almost cold air.
When I stand up, there will be grass clippings stuck to the back of my extended legs, all the way up to the ass of my pants. Its a little hard to see the layer of grass that follows me from work back home and upstairs to my room everyday because of the similar green it shares with my carpet, but walk on it barefoot and you can feel it. Look on your socks and you can see it.
I really should clean this place up. I would unpack the rest of my stuff from those cardboard apple boxes sitting in the corner next to the bookshelf, but where the hell to? One corner is already devoted to this unnecessarily large bed, another to cardboard boxes, dvds, and the empty cd cases leftover from a stolen book of cd's, a shoebox full of my important financial papers (student loan overdue, overdrafts, debts, and the occasional confirmation number from a payment made), and my bookshelf.
Which happens to be filling quite well. I had to sell a good portion of my collection a few months back to stay afloat, but with working two jobs and one of them being by a used book store, its growing and evolving. I can honestly say that I am not trying to create a visually impressive collection though, I just really like to read.
The Blackbeard flag hangs between this corner of literature and the next corner: a sewing table posing as a desk.
The desk is entirely wood and well constructed. You can tell someone put a good deal of time into it, and I only wish I had a better use for it. I have a desk in my room, but no chair. Therefore, even though I call it my desk, and that is even though I only call it a desk in the first place, it mostly serves the same purpose as any other horizontal surface to me: it prevents things from falling. My desk keeps gravity at bay for empty beers, pocket knives, a picture of Shadow, some pictures of friends from years past, an unplugged alarm clock, a broken pipe, a rolling machine...I could keep going but I suppose “refuse” about sums it up. Except for the photos, of course.
I had almost forgotten my box of photos. I horde photographs. Most of them are my own, snapshots of a family of four in California, a family of four plus one dog in Overland Park, pictures me and my brother and my dad, or me and my brother and my mom, my 16th birthday party, Japan, then Maui. There would be a 35mm camera in my room if I hadn't gotten it stolen on Maui. I hold on to pictures of my parents before my brother and I were ever born. One of my personal favorites is my dad, no older than 25, standing on the side of the highway in front of a sign for the town of Tightwad, flipping off the camera.
Anyways. The empty space beneath my desk is the area I like to call “Billy's Shit”. Billy's Shit is the leftover random items left behind by room's last rent-payer, Billy. When I look at this area, I see no individual items. Its a solid mass, an intertwining, enmeshing, somewhat cube shaped pure abstraction of items.
A few small high school print making pieces adorn the walls along with my flag, a Ralph Steadman poster, and some empty canvas bags that used to hold 50 lbs of green coffee beans before we roasted them at my evening coffee shop job. I am astounded to find that there are no cobwebs in my room. Maybe its the way my walls bend inward about five feet up from the baseboards at a forty-five degree angle and then flatten to form a ceiling parallel to the carpet, giving the room a trapezoidal shape. Maybe spiders hate trapezoids.
My room is clutter. Its slightly overwhelming, but at the same time this is my clutter. There is a certain comfort to be found in that. I couldn't really say I cherish most of these things, besides the photographs and a handful of books, but all these individual items in this mess of a room together create a picture of who I am. Looking back, I am not necessarily proud of this picture, but it's mine.

Cheers to Kansas City

Disinterested , disaffected adolescents idolozing demons
Pentagrams and crucifixes six six sixs
Pent up rage at distant church steeples
Wishing lightning bolts at angels so said steeples topple

Drug dealers doling dope in dimes
Its a life style baby no emotion no excuses
Its a get by life through guile and guns
Keep us fucked up, keep us thinking this is fun

Dissatisfied drunks dropping out of school
Discombobulated drunks dropping off of porches
Like live fast, die young dreams to fruition
Like I've seen the best minds of my generation...

A city lacking substance, a scene lacking cause
Pentagrams and pot, beers and bongs
Spray paint, crumbling curb, twisted tweaker, vulgar bum, stray cat, and a blood smear
Stay not or you will rot like abandon hope all ye who enter here
A city mind numbing, back breaking, drunk biking, blacked out then sleeping
strung out and hungover, bummed out and looked over
Bracing themselves for another night drunk over