Personality By Place
It amuses me to note just how much of a person’s mind and character can be gleaned from seeing her in her true setting, doing what she was meant to do, surrounded by the things and state of her home. It is likened to invading her very brain as she sprawls naked before you. Not her house, mistake me not. Saying home, I mean home, that place and space to which one belongs, where one is truly and completely oneself. Be it car, couch, bed, or in this case, desk. . .
Picture the scene, floor up, that is, if you could see the floor.
Miniscule patches of lush crimson carpet, shamefully obscured sign of idle wealth, buried beneath the trappings of the hard-driven artist. Dozens of battered notebooks, multitude of colored covers, red, green, every shade of blue, and black, so much black. Tattered covers, frayed and whitening on the edges where the dye has worn away from multitudinous referential returns. Here lie the beginnings, the birth of every idea, scraps of idle thought habitually set down first upon paper, later to expand into the greater plans. Stacks, standing, fallen, and strewn about from frantic searching.
Down there among the work, the remainders of the sustenance of the worker. Empty pizza boxes and takeout cartons, Italian, Chinese, Indian. Mixing with dirty dishes, bowls and plates, glasses with the dregs of Screwdrivers and White Russians staining the bottoms. Crumpled up burger wrappers and flattened french fry boxes.
Littered over the mess, cocktail napkins with a few scrawled lines, ticket stubs, concert, theatre, movie, with single words to spark the memory. Receipts given the same hasty treatment of ink, book store, office supply, video rental, cigarette outlet, cigarette outlet, record shop, gas station, liquor store, liquor store, liquor store, all-night diner, and a dozen clothing stores, places where people with too much taste spend too much cash for too much of a name. Every iota of white space covered in the fine scratches of thin black ink that jerk in her heated scrawl, illegible save to the author’s eye, set down in the language of desperation, of the artist so utterly terrified of not getting the words recorded before they disappear from the racing mind.
Rising from this sea of chaos, the four legs of a chair, thick black-lacquered wood spiraling upwards to meet the thickly cushioned seat and back. Comfortable crimson cushions. Imagine the dye is not dye, but blood. They say, and her arrogance says, that she would bleed blue. But they’re both wrong, even the elitists bleed crimson. Crimson cushions dyed by the blood of the mercilessly whipped marauder of words, by the sweated-out blood of the unyielding.
For she does sweat when she creates, bringing new existence into being, caught in eternal labor pains. Hence the shirt flung over the back of the chair, midnight blue silk draped, carelessly flowing, perfectly matching that which encases short legs, curled beneath her upon the chair. Midnight blue, near black, meeting pale skin, pink undertones heightened by effort, but still so very pale is the expanse of flesh. Breasts just enough for a handful slowly rising and falling with each passing breath, the lines of a mildly defined abdomen bending slightly as she shifts her weight. Beyond the stones encasing the dimly candlelit room, snow blankets the ground. Still, a bead of sweat, springing from shoulders too wide for a proper midwestern lady, begins its path down her back. Funneled between toned musculature, to roll down the spine, following the defined depression, a shallow canal, to meet and be lost in the midnight sea of blue at her waist.
Before the chair, so often her home, a massive desk of matching material, simple, functional, dark, beautiful. Upon the lacquered surface, those things of convenience, and inspiration, demanded.
To the right, a not-so-modest stereo system, currently blaring forth the rapture of highland bagpipes upon an old tune, Heather Island, at a volume much too immodest for the ridiculous hour. And yet, such beauty can never know too great a volume, can never by cried out loudly enough to reach the ear of every soul it may touch. Scattered about the three vibrating speakers, the predictable hard shapes of CD cases, from Tupac to Tchaikovsky, Garbage to Gregorian chant, Fatboy Slim to Feral Maggots, Prodigy to Portishead to Presidents of the USA, Metallica to Madonna to Matthews, Dave that is, and beyond, an eclecticism rarely appreciated by any.
To the left, a thirteen-inch television, flickering eternally between MTV, ESPN, and CNN, the unholy trinity as it were. Beside it, its consort in disruptive plague, a slim black telephone, drowning in a sea of crumpled scraps of white, each bearing a different set of numbers, and a different name, in a different hand.
A mess resembling that of the floor also consumes the remainder of the desk, leaving only the keyboard and mousepad uncluttered. Script-filled papers and precise printouts slashed with the red ink of editing form the base, bleeding over the edges to add to the surrounding disorder. Upon this ocean rides a fleet of carefully labeled computer disks, the finished work and work in progress, birthed from the plethoric ink-scrawled seeds. Marching across the field, an army in green, empty cans of Mountain Dew, empty bottles of Heineken, hollow soulless army. A stick of incense, caught in the clutches of a detailed European dragon, lends a screen of perfumed smoke to the battlefield. Sheets of paper, etched with ink, crumpled and crushed into balls, discarded thought, useless ideas, casualties of war, dot the region, blessedly few. Just off to the side, a crowd of berserker troops disguised as medics, glaring orange pill bottles, wearing labels of stark white, bearing their various nametags. Long unpronounceable names of the posing saviors, wielding hope, that cruelest of traitorous killers. They lurk deviously near three precarious stacks of books, among the mess, the only things untouched, in perfect condition, lovingly preserved from the surrounding carnage. Dictionary, thesaurus, half a dozen disparate writing handbooks and manuals. Psychology, mythology, Origin of Species, the King James Bible, The Merits of the Devil, Buddhism, crowned by The Fountainhead. The latest Robert Jordan, Steven King, Anne Rice, keeping company with Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte, and Poe, topped by a favored copy of Watership Down
From the place of honor, as though a shrine placed directly before the seat of the creator, a glaring light shines. The seventeen-inch monitor takes precedence, lording over all. Arranged directly around it, to be seen most often, a small stone worn smooth by a frigid mountain creek, a hunk of lava rock still bearing the salt of the ocean, and a miniature cactus in a simple clay pot. Reminders of the water, her element, her home, her joyful comforter and source of relaxation, and a reminder that life can still flourish in its deprivation.
The incessant tapping of fingertips over the keyboard is so constant that it passes unnoticed, until it suddenly pauses. Hands lift from their home, small, pale, riddled with the paler white of the innumerable tiny scars that collect on the hands of the absentminded and uncaring, and the occasionally violent. Cigarette and cooking burns, shapeless knicks from various sharp corners, the fine lines of a knife, crisscrosses of torn and split knuckles, and the crookedness of one improperly-healed broken ring finger.
Fortunately, the poor abused appendages haven’t far to travel for their objective and meet no obstacles, just to the right of the keyboard, convenient location of immediate gratification. Half-eaten peanut butter and banana sandwich perched on the only napkin not to bear the ink of thought, disappears quickly, consumed for necessity’s sake. Quickly follows the remainder of yet another can of Mountain Dew. A cigarette plucked from a half-empty pack lifts to perch between thin, moist lips. Light flares aside from the artificial glow of the screen, silver Zippo, engraved rearing dragon, carries flame to the smooth cylinder. Indrawn breath, harsh click of closure, and the dragon returns to its place, resting beside an even stranger creature. Plain glass ashtray, filled to near overflowing, the butts forming a forest of radiating legs, strange sea anemone. Exhale, twin streams of white emerge from nostrils, floating over defined cheekbones, curling up past the ovals of attractive, expensive, necessary, yet hated reading-glasses, filtering through unruly strawberry blond bangs, to dissipate near the ceiling.
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