There’s nothing that will get you more depressed than a birthday that you don’t want to tell anyone about but that everyone (very possibly sensing your acute uneasiness) remembers and insists on celebrating.
However, to my consequent disappointment, the insistence on celebrating petered out after a few modest refusals on my part. After the indignity of having to tell everyone my age, to briefly reminisce on my uneventful life and to share my aspirations for the year ahead, I was no better off, even in the way of a free drink. So other than the few calls, several text messages and two automatically generated well-wishes from two internet forums I long-ago subscribed to but no longer read, I was essentially alone for my birthday.
She had come to see me a week later in a café down the road. It just so happened that she was in the neighbourhood and called me an hour beforehand. I had been playing video games for three hours straight so I took her up on the offer, even though she irritated me with the way she had asked if I had just woken up. I never got any credit from her, although I’m certain her worst assumptions about me are nearly all true.
She was wearing the same clothes she always wore but her hair was down and it looked nice. She had what looked like a garbage bag in her hand and as soon as she got to my table, plonked it unceremoniously in front of me. I wondered what it was but before I could ask or even say hello,
“Hey I got you something.”
A dismal dread overcame me when I realised they were my clothes.
She untwisted the handle and rummaged in the bag, making an exaggerated face of effort. She found it at the bottom, took the bag away and presented it to me with a flourish.
It was an old National Geographic with a smiling young Polynesian girl on the cover. It was wrinkled and warped as if had been thrown out in a sodden box after a flood. Well, at least they weren’t my clothes.
“Happy Birthday!”
I smiled faintly, trying to keep it as wry as I could muster to conceal my disappointment.
“How did you know?”
“Of course, I’d remember your birthday, silly!”
“No, not that. That I wanted an old, water-damaged National Geographic for my birthday.”
“Well I’m sorry I couldn’t get you that gold watch you wanted.” She snapped, but quickly regained her smile and said “I wrote you a dedication on the inside cover. Look at the date – it’s the month and year you were born, December 1974, silly.”
“Oh, that’s cool.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
And she was right, I did.
So we had an unremarkable meeting that afternoon in the café. She launched into her monologue about some pious petition she was involved with and her new set of work friends, full-time marketers during the week and lifetime career-activists on the weekends. I listened as much as I needed to and gave the correct responses but only narrowly avoided an argument by not paying enough attention anyway. I was quietly pleased to recognise how unconcerned I was although I still found her a little captivating with her hair out and a mess around her face. I wondered why she hadn’t cut it, like she said she would.
As we were waiting to pay our bill at the counter, I asked her why she was carting around a garbage bag. She laughed and put on the smile she used to imbibe some intrigue. I reiterated my question, on cue, like a well-trained monkey.
“Well, you know, I just love those op shops around here. I got a whole bunch of great stuff for five dollars! It’s amazing there. I got these great pants and a pure wool sweater. Oh, but wait… I’ve got some of your shirts here too. I wanted to donate them but they have too much stock at the moment. You don’t mind if I give them back to you? I know you don’t need them but it seems a waste, don’t you think?”
The National Geographic sat on my grey bookshelf for a week. Unlike the rest of my long-forgotten books squeezed against each other, I perched it on the thin space between the book spines and the edge of the bookshelf, its front cover smiling at me. The girl had a flower in her hair. Her open mouth belied the sensuality and innocence of Gauguin’s exotic beauties but I preferred to think of the Mona Lisa and her knowing gaze through her welcoming good-cheer. In any case I never knew about any of these pretty women before I had met her.
You have to learn to love me.
I’m presented with this each time I’m faced with a new operating system. Not only must I work with it for it to work with me, I must begin to think like it and eventually to understand it so that we never differ.
Today we cannot reach an agreement on a certain peripheral. I’ve reached a stalemate and I don’t want to go on. I shut the lid of my laptop and sit and wait. There is nothing I can do and no point pursuing the matter so I get up and sit on the couch in the living room. There is nothing that epitomises a supreme state of apathy than a man staring blankly at a television or better yet a man staring at a television that isn’t even turned-on. I sat for the longest while gazing without observing my own reflection in the dusty grey surface.
I can’t go on.
I imagine how my imaginary rival would be at this moment. Probably outdoors playing football or walking his ingratiating, smiling Staffordshire. He may well have turned on the television, realised that the football wouldn’t be on till four that afternoon and turned it off. He would then call his friends and they would all agree to spend the day in the park to kick a ball around. They would play all day and then go to a quaint, local pub and drink expensive ale on tap.
This man has been with me for as long as I can remember. He used to take the form of old school friend but I hadn’t seen him for so long that he lost the qualities of a real person and became indistinguishable from the thin air. Now he has the face of a smarmy, arsehole called Allen. I think about him when I have nothing to do but sometimes even then, he evacuates my head no doubt having better things to do and nicer places to be.
I collected all the Commodore 64s and the pieces of circuitry to take to my mother’s home. When I got there, nobody was home but the rank smell of burnt meat. I dropped my boxes in my old room and went into the kitchen. There was no longer any smoke and the suspect chicken was actually sitting on the kitchen counter neatly shredded into small skinless pieces in a bowl. I picked up the bowl and sniffed it but I couldn’t decipher its smell from the overpowering stench of burnt flesh. I put it back down on the counter and went back into my old room.
I waded through some cardboard boxes while I waited for my mother to return. I opened one up, marked “Schoolbooks: 1980-86” in my mother‘s meticulous, cursive script. I knew my mother didn’t want me to disturb the order of her ‘things’ but I opened it easily as the adhesive of the old packing tape had dried up and only rested on the top of the box as a formality. I pulled out each exercise book and flipped through the pages carefully. I remembered some things I had drawn and written and I was pleased to see the early signs of my precociousness and humour, but I remained largely unmoved by the experience. I didn’t read any trauma between my large, awkwardly formed letters or disturbing scenes of violence that could explain my later feelings of profound misanthropy. The best thing I found was a detailed rendition of an Ultima map in coloured pencils with my own handwriting mimicking the font of the game’s packaging. I pulled it out of my Year 4 English book and put it in my copy of Lord Jim. I put all the faded books into two piles and stuck them back in the box. They didn’t seem to fit as well as they did before as I couldn’t quite close the top, so I shut the flaps, placed the tape back on the top and stuck another box marked “Stencils” on top of it.
I went back out to the living room and looked through my mother’s bookshelf. There was a large coffee table book on France, which I took out and flipped through. The pictures reminded me of the 1974 National Geographic which featured a story on the villages around the Pyrenees. The children playing in the street were so ecstatic. I was unable to relate to such an idyllic scene, although my cousin possessed a photo of me in a rather similar vein. In the photo, I am jumping on a chair in a garden with a group of other children. We are dressed rather formally for a party but our short jackets and collared shirts are in disarray from running around and playing games all afternoon. I cannot remember if my mother has the same photo or any photo of that day. I have a feeling that it may have been somebody’s First Holy Communion party. I wedged the book on France back in its place and it was then I noticed my mother had her own hardback edition of Lord Jim.
I found my own copy close by and looked for my place in the lengthy tome, now book-marked by my hand-drawn map. I searched for the same place in my mother’s edition and started reading it on the couch in front of her television. After the fourth page, I realised that the room had grown dark and my eyes were straining to make out the words in front of me.
I got up and switched on the light but nothing happened. I peered into the permanently yellowed light fixture and could see that the light bulb had blown. I was highly doubtful that my mother would keep provisions for these situations so I flicked the switch back off and sat back down on the couch.
I sat there without thinking of anything in particular until the room was completely dark.
Ink drawing by Max Breedon : colour images found in the 1974 December edition of National Geographic