Dismantle My Bed

There is nothing wrong with leftovers. Leftovers can be a very good thing. Thanksgiving leftovers, cold pizza breakfast leftovers, to-go boxes at overly pricey restaurants that enable you to divide one meal into two and alleviate the agony at the price.

But then there are the other leftovers, the Mom made too much mush for Grandma, blue light special on liver in aisle four, week after Easter, boiled eggs in everything kind of leftovers.

When I first had my book printed and it arrived in mass quantities all shiny and new, I was so excited to rip open that first box and hold it in my hands that it took me fifty boxes into unloading to realize, “These boxes are fuckin’ heavy.”

When we moved out of that apartment, into a different one not too many miles away, we loaded all of the boxes onto a truck and took them with us. When we unloaded them, I only made it twenty boxes before it occurred to me “These fuckin’ boxes really are fuckin’ heavy.”

When we made our latest move, from Tennessee (why did we ever live there?) to Ohio (why did I ever move back here?), both the load and the unload had the same incessant soundtrack. It was as if I was standing at the rim of a canyon, the Grand one even, and yelled “Fucking boxes!” And the universe returned again and again and again, “Fucking boxes! Fucking boxes! Fucking boxes!”

It was in moving the boxes of books, yet again, into platform bed pose, because we needed to make them fit somewhere, that it suddenly occurred to me. I am not moving these books again. While there is too much energy, thought, and money invested in the little fuckers to destroy them, that’s exactly what I am going to do if I don’t sell them in the next few months.

I’m going to incinerate, annihilate, pollute the lungs of the suddenly environmentally-conscious populace of the entire eastern United States. I tell ya, I’m going to go crackers on those paperbacks.

I shouldn’t write that, not even in frustrated artist jest. If, knock wood, there is a fire now, the insurance company is so going to use this as an excuse not to pay.