The winter chill still lingers in the air through the wretched howling wind and the raindrops are clicking on my window in a harsh, pixelated groan. I lie on the bed without spectacle like any man lies on his bed. If David Foster Wallace thinks everyone is identical through their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from anyone else, then this is the moment when I, a person usually heavily armored by words, implicit judgements, and various deep-seated internal rules, need to concede that yes, I'm indeed identical to everyone else. This, is a moment of angst, of tedium and of discordance of the mind, stemming not only from a sense of helplessness in face of reality's immovability, but also from a recognition of the fact that there exists an upper extent of human agency whose presence is not susceptible to feel-better chatterers, make-belief romances, and a healthier or less healthy diet. And it pervades my dwelling in this tiny room just like it does in many other rooms.
I continue to lie on the bed and carry out different body positions of varying twists and outlandishness and potential future reassurance of comfort. But all of these efforts are thus far empirically progressing towards an ill ending. To rub salt into the wound, the yellow furnitures that surround me would crack haphazardly in tiny explosions of the wood - blam blam blam, leaving me jerked and wondering like an idiot. My significance as a human male seems to diminish mechanically with each of these explosions. Perhaps in some other rooms in College Nordmetall or elsewhere, furnitures are also exploding, with their respective persons, tender or strong, hopeful or disillusioned, social or reclusive, witnessing time's passing-by in a kind of collective symphonic chore of life. Leopold Bloom muses in his square in Ulysses "Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.". It's been a while since I last had blood washed off me; and it'll take a while for me to kick the bucket; I am in the middle of these two, a tiny fraction of the middle as a matter of fact, yet my belief in its uniqueness remains puzzlingly firm, or rather, "settled by a warm human plumpness", as Joyce would put it.
The corridor is resolutely silent. The Sunday evening crowd of some Korean woman's birthday party is quelled. And nary a sound can be heard. I wonder secretly if I too, should brace myself up for the likes of YouTube or LRB - the external, pampering things on screen and on paper - though my timidity that results from having only worn a pair of underwear makes such a move quite unseemly. So I decide for the next hour, to languish on the bed until sleep. I, and I alone hidden behind this third floor window, with brownish light oozing through the curtain and a man wide awake inside, am so uncreative to the point of banality - I wiggle my fingers around this wad of smartphone like a child on a piece of chocolate, fondling the touchscreen with all the raw adeptness that the youngsters of this generation have. This posture of lazily holding a smartphone in bed is one so automatically post-modern that it tends to make everything else less tenable - suffering, death and the process of growing older from a young man seem frail and irrelevant amongst all the mental candies of the user interface in which I so readily indulge.
I suspect, that everything I have thought of on this bed, in these few weeks, in all weeks, has also been thought of by some other people, perhaps less intently so that their thoughts don't oblige them to write them down. Maybe they would instead dismiss these thoughts as mere anomalies of their mental process. But I am not in a position to make such a claim, or to make any claim, because who am I, but one person with his own thoughts. When I cross other people in my path their existence always fascinates me - their burgeoning young and old faces, colorful and monotonous clothings, the way they walk and their peaceful surety of it, and their vague optimism and dismay towards their strand of life different from my own.
The night is late, and my room has begun to blend into a sort of abstraction. Otherworldly definite indefinite sounds and sights swirl by like my mom's lullaby that I don't remember, and I surrender to another of a night's sleep in the same underwear's timidity and unseemliness.
