xx

“California sunlight, sweet Calcutta rain, Honolulu starbright, the song remains the same.”

-Led Zeppelin

This is not my house.

This is not my bed, or my sheets, or my whir of the ceiling fan. This is not my indoor potted plant, or my view of Lake Hamilton, or my kitschy wall decorations (“If you want breakfast in bed, go to sleep in the kitchen.”)

But this is my pillow, the same off-white cover pulled tightly over its body-length, deep-smelling still of home and of Texas and of the room of pictures and action figures, being clutched as I promise to eventually fall asleep.

And this is my new computer, already showing signs of wear through its wonderfully-alien outer shell because near-constant use will do that to any clueless laptop. And this is my downloading of new music, through the legal wonders of birthday giftcards, the smell of the water wafting into the window glass and into my nose, mouth, and earphones.

These new music additions to my laddered and alphabetical mahogany-paneled library are inherently familiar, mostly comprised of those bands that I trust to not waste my free fifty digital dollars, or so I hope, drifting past the foreign curtains smelling of lake-water and dog, hoping that the copyright-protected, DRM-laden sound bytes contain a noted line, a strained chorus that reminds me of my life or, at least, my quaint perception of my life, somehow.

Because, for the past few weeks, I’ve been finding these needy musical parallels in the most awful of places, those few mp3’s which hid themselves deep within the album scroll of my protectively-encased iPod, embarrassingly still waiting to be queued, waiting to be relevant.

The boy bands, for instance, from the crackling AM radio days of my childhood of glasses and short-sleeved button-downs came back during my daily run last week to crooningly remind me about a girl from years/a week ago. The high school band, the one made up of friends that I haven’t seen in a year, is also there on this scratchy bed. And then Bob Dylan, mustachioed or not, also steps off of my shelved playlist, apparently unaware of his unwant but somehow still aware of my changing social situation:

If your time to you is worth savin'

Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone

for the times they are a-changin'.

            I miss my bed.