I Don't Get It

I'm sitting in front of my computer.

My parents paid for this computer, mostly. I paid for as much of it as I could, and the rest was covered by a generous, no-interest parental loan. A rare instance of my benefiting from inflation.

I feel spoiled. I don't want to call it "my computer," I want to call it "the computer."

This is one of the two activities that dominate my time in my room, which dominates the time in my life. I lie in my bed, or I sit in front of my computer. I listen longingly to the eccentricities and surprises of strange music, filling up with frustration. I feel like I can hear what I'm missing out on. I don't know anything about the creative process of this music, the people and relationships that make it, or the feel of the places where it comes from. They're inaccessibly distant, not just because they're mostly in Canada.

From where I lie on my bed, I used to see a Red Wings banner celebrating their 2008 Stanley Cup championship. I'd hung it up on the back of one of the bookshelves that forms a wall of my room. I'd never liked its layout, and it was beginning to resonate with the power of stir crazy monotony, so I took it off recently.

I think a lot, and very hard. I spend a lot of time staring. When I'm lying in bed, I see what looks like a shadow on the back of that bookshelf, a permanent sun-protected imprint of my Red Wings poster.

I also took away a medal I'd hung up, one of those you win just by being on the kids' soccer team. Looking now, I see that it too left an imprint, what looks like a scorch mark down the back of the other bookshelf.

I walk up and down the stairs a lot. Sometimes I don't have a reason. I plan on doing something just after I get back from the upstairs trip I need to take. I can't quite speak. I walk around. I look in the fridge. I can't quite speak. I dismiss what's on TV. I walk around. I look in the fridge. I dismiss what's on TV. I go back downstairs.

My soccer medal was on a necklace. I don't know what they're called, those things for hanging medals around necks (or keys, I often see). Some of them advertise for colleges, or the army. My soccer necklace looked like a party hat from Chuck. E. Cheese's.

Songs pop into my head with the appropriateness of network news. Lighting up a cigarette, I hear Stevie Jackson singing "...smoke another one..." When I'm overwrought, I hear "Take it Easy." When I realize that I need google to know anything about a song's context, I hear the Beatles' "Nowhere Man."

Is that actually the name of the song? I don't remember.