Bubble Bath

Once again I find myself confronted with an opening line dealing my listening to Boards of Canada, and the very weird place it puts me. So I won’t elaborate much. But for a quick Dayvan Cowboy update, I have just finished listening to it for the first time in months literally, and I was in the ocean, and the waves were tumbling my mind, and while I’m not in an existential crisis yet, I am a bit dazed. The weather is grey and I am far from the sea in a place I have been, and been, and been, with vibrant memories flashing and swirling in my mind of distant places, distant people. I am looking out this window, again again again, at this tree I have seen so many times it is now a part of my mind, and the weather isn’t grey, it’s the sky, so oppressive it’s found its way inside.

That’s the basic gist of it anyway.

There are many fruitful and productive things I could be engaging myself in. I could be exercising at this luxurious apartment complex’s 24 hour gym. I could be bathing myself in the Dove soap shaped bathtub, the kind that, when you see one somewhere you either think to yourself or say aloud, “I’d love to take a bubble bath in that!” But that sad truth is, if you had that bath tub, you would rarely, if ever, take a bubble bath in it. You wouldn’t treat yourself to some lemonade or some hot tea, and sit in the tiny, tickling bubbles for an hour, some candles lit, reading a book, closing your eyes and listening to some tunes. If you even made it as far as the bubbles, you’d, in all likeliness, sit in the underappreciated warmth of the water, and think about all the other things you should be doing that are productive and non-frivolous for about ten minutes before deciding to get out and become a person you can respect and your mother can be proud of. After deciding this you will drain the bath, wasting fifty gallons of water, killing several fish and completely obliterating one species of algae, all for naught, since you didn’t even enjoy yourself. And worst part of it all is that, en route to accomplishing the first item on your list of ‘should’ activities, you will turn on the tv, sit your dimpled ass on the sofa, and not move for the next several hours except to stuff your jiggling face with potato chips or to relieve your self of your bodies fetid waste.

It’s grim, I know, but it’s reality.

Can’t we just accept our congenital selfishness sometimes? And by “we”, I mean “I”. Can’t we just do what we need to do sometimes instead of what we should do? I can only stand in appalled amazement when mentally observing the vast library of tomes left unwritten by me in lieu of tidying or dish washing or worst of all, television. Disgusting. All that genius wasted on an hour of mindless entertainment, a clean kitchen which will only once again become dirty after dinner.

About a year ago now, I was in the apogee of a fantastic phase for me. It was an era during which I commented at the very least twenty times daily on my awesomeness. Instead of hearing a constant inner monologue of self-doubt, self-loathing, fear, insecurity, I was verbally reiterating the nature of my awesome. A very simple and very effective affirmation. You don’t need to write one hundred sentences a day on the things you want or don’t want in your life. This is a catchall. When you are awesome, everything else falls into place. The only possible negative side effect, if it could even be viewed as negative, is excessive self-confidence, which, to some nay-sayers, could translate as a superior complex. Not so. I always encouraged my friends to celebrate their awesome vocally, and they did. And you know what? It helped them too.
Here’s the sad thing. These days, when, in some sort retrogressive tribute I say “I’m awesome” it sounds weak and pathetic. It sounds like a lie. Maybe it’s the lack of coke, maybe it’s the fact that I’m not on an awesome solo voyage. I don’t know the answers to these speculations. But I do know that at some point I stopped saying it, and as a consequence, I stopped believing it.
So, do I believe in my awesome no matter what, or do I make myself something I can’t help but to believe in the awesomeness of? Maybe some where in between.