A Wilde Night
A Wilde Night
“The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.”
There’s a curious romance in claiming the effects of age too soon. I notice my friends and I doing it more and more -- a pre-emptive strike, perhaps -- claiming a raindrop to give you the credibility of a flood. It’s not a new phenomenon. This is the same combination of half-baked conclusions and plagiarized storytelling we employed in high school to feign greater wisdom than we had. Look how far we’ve come! We’ve traded fables of imagined sexual encounters and drunkenness for premature complaints of far-sightedness and memory loss. Why, yes, I will have another shot of Metamucil.
The older I get, the more annoyed I become at trends in my behavior that appear at first as small idiosyncrasies and then, bloom into full-blown traits, over which I have no control and which just seem to be my involuntary and increasingly predictable reactions to the cruel march of time. Maybe they’ll be charming and eccentric at some point, but for the moment, they irritate me.
“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early or be respectable.”
The first blossom on my withering tree involves that magical hour of the evening when you abandon the day and plop down in front of the television to let the relaxing confidence that you will not accomplish another single thing wash over you. From the moment my increasingly flatter butt hits the cushion, a countdown begins. Within an hour -- or maybe an hour and a half if my day has been even more sedentary than usual -- no matter how riveting, hilarious or engrossing the show is, I fall asleep. Thankfully Tivo can be set to retain your favorite shows -- not to watch them again in my case, but to make a second (and sometimes third) attempt at watching them for the first time. This new narcoleptic tendency combined with my virtuoso command of procrastination is the reason Netflix movies live in our DVD player for months at a time.
The problem rears it’s sleepy head when I wake up several hours later with the unexplainable need for a set of ultra-absorbent rags as well as the assurance that nearly any problem can be solved with three easy payments of $29.95. By the time I find all the off buttons, shake off the horror of allowing an assailant of prostitutes unfettered access to my unconscious and stumble through the dark to the bedroom, sleep is no longer an option. As tossing and turning usually just makes the situation worse, I fire up my iPad and ironically, watch streaming movies on Netflix. After some time (usually at the later end of the 3 o’clock), I doze off again.
On the evening in question, the above-described scenario is exactly what happened. I’m going through a Stephen Fry/Oscar Wilde phase currently and in a moment of fortuitous foresight, had downloaded the movie Wilde onto my iPad. In my mind, Oscar Wilde, wit and the appreciation of beauty always make me think of my friend Shane, who’s gone a year on November 16th. Having watched more than half of Stephen Fry’s fantastic performance during a bout of wee hour wakefulness earlier in the week, Wilde alone wasn’t enough to get me to sleep. To my happy surprise, The Importance of Being Earnest was available for streaming and I immediately dove in. Witty dialogue and great acting, notwithstanding, my nods to artistry were soon exchanged for nods of slumber.
“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing...”
Some indeterminate time later, I was jolted awake by the unmistakably horrible stench of skunk. This was not the gentle waft of stinky woodland creatures, this was the kind of stench that convinces you that you have angry, spraying varmints under the bed. As I laid there consciousness slowly came back over me and I was just about to write the whole thing off as an olfactory hallucination brought on by cheap wine. Then Brian rolled over. “What is that smell?”
As a confirmed disbeliever in shared hallucinations, I got up to investigate. As I stumbled around the house in the dark, it was clear that the smell wasn’t really anywhere but the bedroom. As my inconclusive search ended, I returned to bed, installed a pillow over my face as a filter and somehow managed to fall back to sleep.
“There was a boy -- a very strange enchanted boy, and though he travelled very far, very far over land and sea ...”
I was suddenly wrenched awake once again. This time by blaring music from within the house. Once I realized I was awake, I was sitting bolt-upright in the bed. Angela McCluskey was warbling her best version of Nature Boy at a volume entirely inappropriate for the middle of the night. I stumbled into the dark hallway again and noticed light coming from the dining room. As I entered the room, I discovered the television was on and the DVD menu for Shane’s memorial service was on the screen with the volume all the way up. I frantically fumbled with buttons and managed to make the room go dark and quiet.
As Brian listened to the details, he put the pieces together. “Shane’s here.” I know he was right. Never one for subtlety, skunk cologne might be just the thing he would wear to get noticed from the other side and then to discover the DVD I made of his memorial service playing in our dining room in the middle of the night -- well, there’s just no other explanation.
I’m happy for the visit and hope more interactive contact is in store.
I miss you, darling.
Saturday, November 13, 2010