Atomictumor

I came into work today with my little external hard drive. See, for various reasons, I haven’t had music at work for the past few weeks like I always used to do, so I brought the hard drive in, hooked it up to the company lappy (yes, I have a company lappy. Season of change, lemme tell ya) and got down with some of the music.

Now, I didn’t have a lot of time to get a lot of music. You have to transfer it from the media computer, which (for various reasons) has a wifi connection, over to the lappy, which has a wifi connection, over to the hard drive. I guess I could have hooked the hard drive straight up to the media computer, but the plug is behind a dresser, and lo, the obstacles we all have.

So, I didn’t get a lot of music. I got maybe 14, 15 records, all newish stuff, or stuff that I haven’t listened to in a while. Stuff that kinda caught my eye in the 5 minutes I was throwing stuff on the drive (before the 45 minutes it took to transfer).

Today, after driving the kids to school, where Juicebox and I sang Happy Birthday to BJ, and talked about how he’ll have two mommie’s when we’re all in heaven, I got to work and plugged that bad boy in. Its been great listening to music.

The song playing now, and the one that prompted me to write this today, is Casimir Pulaski Day, by Sufjan Stevens. I haven’t listened to it in a long time, its a song that always had a huge emotional meaning to me.

Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

It just always used to hit me.  I’d be in tears by the time the song was over, and when I got to the point when I felt done being in tears, when I wasn’t going to let sadness overwhelm me anymore, I just kinda avoided the song.  If it came on the shuffle, I’d skip it.

Well, it came on today, of all days.  And it brought back my talk with my little boy, who has two mommies.  And my big boy, in the car the other day, about how much he loves the people in his life.  And my talk with my second love of my life, about how she loves BJ for reasons that I can maybe understand but not explain, and about how I love my second love with every part.  And it made me think that I’m not sad that today’s birthday girl is gone, but that I’m happy that I have her birthday to celebrate with my family.  And it brought back 10 years in my past.  And it brought back the thought of untold years in my future.

And it still puts a lump in my throat, that song, but not the same way.  It brings out the amazing goodness of life, about how it has downs, sure, it has hard downs that we experience, but the amazing highs of being up overwhelm them, and how those surreal joys, when you’re thinking “this can’t be real” are somehow more real than the hard times.

And I smile instead, as I send a text message to that sweet second love of my life “I love you”/

So, we’ve all agreed that the new Bed, the one that came today, behind the closed bedroom doors not 20 feet away from where I’m sitting right now, has to be capitalized.

Because its freakin awesome.

See, I had a decent bed. Sure, it was old, and lumpy, and handed down, and it had been flipped a dozen times trying to bring that lump/comf ratio back even, but it was good because it was a goliath California King sized monster of a bed, and I got some long legs.

Now, I was on that thing by myself for a good long time, and when I laid in it, it was like I was the ruler of a giant, industrious world of bed. The industry was, well, sleep, I guess, but it made it in spades. And I was King AT. Actually, I prefer El Presidente AT. Or maybe Duke AT. But then you get into brown humor, and nobody wants to go there.

I digress.

Anyway, that bed was the cats meow, and I slept on it like a mighty man. It was big, and cold, and pretty lonely, but the big makes up for most of it, so I had plenty of room to stretch out, or roll around, or jog in place, or whatever I fancied.

When the Lady came into the picture, and the time came to consolidate my stuff into her house because it made all sorts of sense (still does), we both totally agreed that moving a big ass industrious world of bed was probably not entirely needful, and in fact, would lead to all sorts of problems. So, I Craigslisted that bad boy, and got me like 75 clams. Score.

The Lady, now, she had had a little bed adventure (ooo, that sounds bad too…) of her own, and went out a year ago or so and bought a nice cherry bedroom set with a pillowtopped queen bed, the kind of thing that makes little puffs of cotton brag about being tuff. It was a massive ass sleigh bed, but as it was a queen, it wasn’t quite a world, and I don’t know that it was very industrious because, well, the pillowtop was a little too soft, and the mattress kept in that body heat so that your body was a bit of a scale representation of the planet Mercury, with one side (the side facing the bed) boiling hot, and the other side (the side that you’ve ripped all the covers off and fastened a lawn sprinkler to) very, very chilly. A poor compromise indeed.

But, hell, we sold that bad boy too. Now, this is where our logic seems a bit hazy. Neither of us really dug on the big ass sleigh footboard, because it liked to kick you in the leg when you weren’t paying attention, and the mattresses issues have been well documented, sure, but we ended up selling the mattress and box springs, and moving in the old family mattress that had adorned her former guest room (which was now the kids room) for us to sleep on.

The guest mattress was a queen, and had no real flaws, but a distinct lack of comf. It was not industrious. It produced sleep, but the kind of sub-quality sleep that had you pouring coffee in your hat and stretching your back against all sorts of interesting things to work out the morning kinks. We slept on that thing for a good few months, me, the Lady, and Mikey (the Beagle), and every night dreamed little dreams about the magical day when an industrious world sized bed would come into our lives.

So, we bought one. We went out a couple weeks ago, shopped around, and found a bitching headboard and mattress. The mattress is a combination of my old beds bignitude and general thermal reliability, and the Lady’s queens newness and not-old-and-bustedness. We were picky, now. We laid in many beds in the course of our shopping. We discovered that apparently california king beds are, despite the fact that they really kinda make more sense, not easily found in places that aren’t California. We found that most bed frames have foodboards, and are ugly. We found that furniture shopping is an facinating industry, filled with mazelike showrooms that lead to dead ends, leaving you prey for the slow but relentless salesperson to try to hit you with their latest financing offers, despite how many times you explain, in english, that you’re buying your bed with cash.

Finally, we found our Bed.

So here it is:

And let me tell you, its friggin sweet.

“But AT, why’s the door closed to your bedroom?”

Oh, thats because the Lady and I have fully agreed that we are not going to get on The Bed until its bedtime tonight. Because how often do you get to lay down for bed for the first time in a brand new sweet ass world of industrious and beautiful comf? Not often, man. Not often.

But the problem is, that sweet ass Bed calls. Its all like “AT, dude, she won’t know. Seriously. Take a nap.”

So I closed the door.

Keeps the cats off it too.

Friggin cats.

Seems like I was going to make some sort of analogy to this being a conversation a while back, maybe a week or two ago, in a post that I was going to put up but decided against, but the thought is still there.  Or something like that.

Like how in a conversation, and when you’re good at it, its best to be on a roll.  To start out the conversation, and keep points coming, to listen, but to be engaging at the same time.

In this case, its a little awkward, because, well, its kinda been one of those 10 second pauses when everybody’s been looking at you like something’s growing out of your head, and your mind is giving you something about how it wants to maybe get a screwdriver (the drink, not the handy tool) instead of giving you something intelligent to say out of your mouth.

You’ve lost that beat, man, and damned if its going to pick up by itself.  Your mind wandered, you daydreamed, the other guy is saying something about galvanized siding, and all you have is a taste for a delicious orange juice and vodka combination, and then maybe watching something dull on the history channel.  Or putting the dishes in the dishwasher away.

It could all be folly.  But, hell, you’re on the hot seat, and you have to come up with something.

So you do, and its not at all what you’d want it to be.  Luckily, its not about your craving for alcoholic goodness, or how clean the new dishwasher gets your steak knife, and its enough to get everybody looking in the other direction for a few minutes while you try to figure out what to say next, how to steer the conversation back to comfortable, familiar grounds.

Hell, I don’t know what I’d do in a situation like that.

Maybe I’d just have a drink with my babydoll, and watch something dully entertaining on the history channel, because in January of 2008 I’ve found that theres few things more comfortable and familiar than the tiny blisses, those microscopic instances that to the untrained eye, look just like wasted time.

But to the trained eye, to somebody that knows what they’re looking for, well, its beauty.

While I was spreading peanut butter on one slice of bread and jelly on another for the kids lunches this morning, I kept thinking about several articles I’d read.

There’s an interview with John D. Crossan where he talks about the first Christmas.

Our conversation ranged from virgin births and Roman censuses to how you became a god in the ancient world, and why it was a bad idea to mess with shepherds.

After seeing all the plastic nativities, who’d guess that the Christmas story was all about revolution.

The nativity story is far richer and more challenging than familiar sentimentalized versions allow. Not simply tidings of comfort and joy, the gospel stories of Jesus’ birth are also edgy visions of another way of life, confronting the status quo and demanding personal and political transformation.

There’s this article about a black guy who got bullied, shoved, cussed and generally terrified by some racist ford pickup truck driving assholes earlier in the week. He was walking home when this happened.

Then there was this article that the Oak Ridger ran about the parents of Ashley Paine. The Paines are saying the city hasn’t done near enough to make Oak Ridge streets safe. Ashley Paine was run over by a school bus earlier this fall.

Mom called yesterday and told me that my sister’s best friend from school died earlier in the week. She was at work when she collapsed. An ambulance rushed her to a hospital where the doctors couldn’t keep her heart beating. It just stopped working and that was the end.

And so it goes.

What does all this have to do with Christmas?

I don’t have a clue.

and so does UPS.