Lust, Envy, Greed and the Perfect Bed

There is a bed that I covet. It tempts me daily. It calls out from the apartment across the street, and I swear it whispers my name. I swear it teases me with persuasive words. Every day it invites me: “Come and lie down; rest your weary self,” it says, “and I will envelop you in my comfort.” Sometimes it tempts me in another language, dreamy and enticing. A little on the poetic side, perhaps, but this bed makes me want to speak in symbols, in rhythms and in prose.

It stares at me, with stunning queen-size eyes and a smooth feather-topped skin. With its rich, dark brown headboard and striking frame, strong and unfaltering, it pulls me in and I want nothing more than to run to it, climb under its covers, rest my head on its soft, luxurious pillows and stay there, day after day, in its security and warmth.

There is no doubt about it. I am in love with this bed.

There is only one problem. Well, two. Two panes of glass separate me from this bed. It is not mine to have; it does not belong to me. No matter how much I want this bed, how much I want to make it mine, there will always be an obstruction. This bed can never be mine. Unless I smash through glass and shatter my surroundings (which on some days I feel like doing), I will never get to this bed. But I would do anything for just one full day… one long, uninterrupted full day and night… to roll around on this bed, to fall asleep in this bed, to dream the sweetest dreams in this bed.

I can’t get this bed out of my head. This bed shows up in my dreams, sometimes these dreams wake me, and I have to leave my own bedroom, walk out to the living room, and fight the urge to crash through all necessary windows to get what I covet.

You see, this bed is perfect.

I don’t know who this bed belongs to. In fact, I have never seen anybody in the apartment. Some days I think it was placed there for a reason, right in front of me, serving as some kind of test. A test of seduction. A test that kills me some times, because I know I will never win. A lesson in patience perhaps, or more likely, a lesson in understanding that I can’t always get what I want.

I think I am breaking at least three of the seven deadly sins.

Lust: My excessive thoughts and desires are basic signs of this. Guilty.

Envy: My insatiable desire for someone else’s goods. Guilty.

Greed: I don’t need this bed, but I really really, really want it. Guilty.

You may be thinking I am taking this a little too far. It’s just a bed in the grand scheme of things, right? Wrong. There is no other bed like this. And no matter how great my own bed is, and no matter how comfortable I am there, I will always wonder whether I will get the chance – just once – to spend an entire night and day in this perfect, flawless, beautiful bed.

But for now, all I can do is hold onto the dreams in which this bed shows up. Close my eyes and imagine myself beneath its covers. Listen to it whisper my name and hope that some day, some way, I will find myself there… just the bed and me… and make this dream my reality.

I’m In the Dark Here

I realize that Al Pacino is better known for some of his other works, but my absolute, all time, watch-over-and-over-every-time-it’s-on-TV-even-though-I-own-the-video-Al-Pacino-movie is Scent of a Woman. There’s one line in the movie that makes me cry. I know it’s coming; I know he’s going to say it; I’m prepared for it—but it makes me cry anyway. Every single time. You just know that Lt. Col. Frank Slade would go back and do it all over again, this time without the mistakes, when he shouts, “I’m in the dark here.”

Well, I’m not in the dark. Not exactly. But I am in denial.

In the daytime, my living room is ideal. I have a lot of furniture in it, and over the course of several years, I have managed to arrange it so that it will accommodate all of my various activities and interests, such as watching TV, playing music (as in a musical instrument), reading and writing. During the day, these different, if you will, activity stations (a term I borrowed from my friend who is a primary school teacher), are well lit by Mother Nature. But when the sun sets, it’s an entirely different story.

My living room has no overhead lighting. I have a banker’s lamp, complete with the popular green glass shade, on my writing desk. There’s a well-placed floor lamp by a corner arm chair and a third lamp on the end table by the sofa. That’s it. As I mentioned, during the day, it’s fine; during the evening, I’m mostly in the dark, underscored by isolated pockets of light.

Every so often, I am given hints that the lighting situation in my living room is not ideal. When planning to do some mending in front of the television, for example, I often find myself getting up from the couch and going into the kitchen to thread the needle. Or when I’ve dropped something on the floor and it’s rolled somewhere, I turn on the desk lamp, floor lamp and table lamp and even the chandelier in the dining room. But the other day, as I was trying to peer into the enclosed storage area of the end table for an item I was looking for, even with all three living room lights turned on, I had to admit defeat and go and fetch the emergency flashlight in the hallway drawer. It was official; I could no longer effectively fool myself that the lighting in my living room was anywhere near adequate.

For the musician’s playing area, complete with music stand, a tree lamp (a floor lamp with more than one fixture) would be great standing in the corner, while a clip-on reading light for the music stand would make it much more functional. The room could easily house two more table lamps, while the existing floor lamp would be much more effective on the opposite side from where it is now standing. Replacing the current table lamp with a 3-way bulb style light would make the area around the end table more versatile and user-friendly. The open stretch of wall above the sofa would be ideal for two sconces. This roughly formulated plan sounds like it might actually be a viable solution—it covers all the bases, including task lighting and ambient lighting.

But something needs to be done, and soon. All I know is that when I ended up having to fetch the flashlight to look for something that was relatively out in the open, I felt pretty silly.

I am fortunate enough to have an ocean view from my apartment. Quite often, on a summer evening, I delay turning on the lights for as long as possible so that I can enjoy the glorious light shows, a.k.a. sunsets that Mother Nature puts on. Suddenly I’ll find I’m in the dark, the last traces of sunlight being reflected in the water as it fades from the sky. There is something to be said for just sitting quietly in a darkened room—it’s soothing and calming, watching the shifting shadow play created by other light sources.

Although, I have to admit, being in the dark is not so soothing or convenient when trying to fix a hem or entertain friends—something tells me they just might object to chatting and snacking with no lights on.

Xs and Os and the Evolution of the Bean Bag Chair

Trying to explain to my grandmother the abstract strategic correlation between American football and chess never went particularly well. The concept of neutralizing selective parts of your opposition, attacking weakened and more vulnerable surface areas, blocking and protection etc., etc. that are common between the two pretty much flew right over her head. Granny loved playing chess and when my father was busy I would accommodate her with a game but, truth be told, I would every time have rather been seated in front of my Nintendo playing Tecmo Bowl or Blades of Steel.

Fast forward all these years, I don’t own a Nintendo Wii but in a sense I am thankful one of my friends does as it seems to have given my wife a measure of insight into my affinity for sports video games. She really enjoyed the physical dimension of it and has taken an according shining to Guitar Hero as well. Beforehand, she was at a loss as to understand why I would become so animated when playing with friends or online. Jumping up and down, using “selective” language, choice pushing and shoving if my opponent was seated next to me, spilled beverages, and so forth and so on. Seeing her throw her arms up and spin around with an animated “whoo!” when she threw her first strike in Wii bowling definitely brought a smile to my face.

When I was about 13 or so, I convinced my parents to buy me an NFL bean bag chair at a garage sale for next to nothing. It was worn but featured the logo of every team, including the best logo in all of pro sports; the super striking lightning bolt of the powerhouse SAN DIEGO CHARGERS! I fondly remember my throne as I think back to the long hours I spent honing my power play and red zone offense while my parents griped “It’s sunny and 23 outside and you want to stay in your room?” Yes, I did.

Nowadays, kids have it a lot better and I have to say I’m a little envious. Bean bag chairs are still well-suited for some serious thumb time, but now it’s likely nearly anyone would prefer a game chair that is explicitly designed for ergonomic comfort and performance during your on-screen conquests. A sound rocker game chair would have been an exquisite luxury for me back then with its augmented audio capacities and back and forth means of calming your anxieties. A wireless rocker game chair might have been a safer option for me due to my continuing propensity to jump up and around as LaDainian Tomlinson bounces into the end zone over and over. Classic game chairs also give you the freedom to locate yourself as close to the screen as you like, and evolution game chairs feature a built-in lap front controller stand. How cool is that!

I remember thinking nothing could touch my NFL bean bagger – Man, us generation X types really got the short end of the stick on this one.

GO BOLTS!!

On the Day I was Going to be Late for Work and My Furniture Helped Me

It has happened to all of us. The alarm goes off, you look at the clock, you see the time and somewhere in your semi-conscious state of half waking you make the decision to simply ignore it, roll over and drift back to sleep. You finally jerk yourself out of your slumber at that irritating point in which you are juuust too late to ever make it on time despite your best efforts, but you try anyway. In an unpleasant blur of tooth brushing and pulling on pants in the dark, you manage to scramble out of your apartment and onto the streets where a walk to the bus provides that final seam which will surely seal your lateness.

Allow me to take a moment and tell you a tale about when I was going to be late for work and my furniture helped me. Not only did I end up not being late, but I also looked extra spiffy and put together.

I normally wake up for work at 7 in the morning. If I wake up at 7 in the morning, I have 45 minutes to get ready, and maybe even enjoy the newspaper over a cup of coffee (though more than likely it will be a cartoon over a bowl of Froot Loops).

Oftentimes I see that ‘7:00’ glowing bright red on my nightstand and refuse to believe that the time has truly come for me to leave my warm cocoon of blankets and sheets and face the cold bathroom floor and the harsh buzz of my electric toothbrush. I see that bright ‘7:00’ flashing in my face and, instead of rising, I simply turn off the alarm and fall back asleep. Generally half an hour to 45 minutes later, I wrench the blankets off of my body and tear through the house like a madwoman trying to compress my 45 minute morning into five.

However, there was something different about this day; something unusual about my morning routine. You see, I had recently fully furnished my apartment with purchases from the reasonably priced and wonderfully easy to navigate online furniture retailer Cymax. I woke up late, like any other day when I wake up late; however this time, squishing my routine into five minutes was much easier than before. Instead of being sprawled on the counter or in some random location, my keys were in the top drawer of my brand new accent table which I had placed conveniently next to my front door. In addition to this, I bought a brand new kitchen cart which not only provided me with a handy place to store my Froot Loops but also a way to wheel around my bowl of cereal so that I could sneak bites while I was rushing to the bathroom from the bedroom to the kitchen and back. Finally, my coat, instead of being thrown haphazardly over a chair, was perched nicely atop a lovely mahogany coat rack, right at the door, ready for me to wear.

I couldn’t believe it, but what with all of my new purchases, my 45 minutes morning routine was easily condensed into five fast minutes! I was shocked and amazed! Especially when my brand new armoire helped me pull my pants up, or when my spanking new night table gently combed my hair while I put my contacts in.

…is that normal?

Snooze Bars and Taking Thread

Christmas past, my mother was reminiscing with my grandmother about how she used to be upset with how frequently her son was getting his face stitched up, 5 times in all to be exact. While I’m not exactly DeNiro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a number of high-sticks, elbows and pucks over the years of competitive hockey have meant 14 or so loops over 4 different sessions. The other time was not so macho glamorous I’m afraid.

As a youth, like many young boys, I had an early morning paper route. I was a reliable paper boy for the most part; you could rely on your paper being on your doorstep every morning, and you could rely on it being dry no matter the weather. However, you couldn’t rely on it being there with any timed consistency as some mornings I’d be out there on my metal-basketed BMX at 6 am and other days I’d only be fetching the papers out of the drop box at 6:40.

Long story short, as a result of a small and cluttered bedroom, my all-important alarm clock was most nights simply resting on the mattress next to me. All too frequently, I would simply have to aim a short slap in the direction of the annoyance to purchase another 10 minutes of slumber without having to become even slightly cognizant. 3 or 4 slaps later, my father would be in the room rousing me and rushing me out the door.

Eventually, my father came up with the idea that locating the alarm on my study desk (which paired with a dresser and bed to make up my entire room) would force me out of the bed and accordingly bring me round and get me out the door on time. It seemed logical enough.

The searing torment of the cacophony that did not cease with my frantic pounding of the mattress around me was indescribable. In a semi-conscious panic, I shot out into the darkness towards the source of the malevolence. Whether I tripped over one of the many items on my floor, or whether my groggy legs failed me, I’ll never know. The underside of my chin bounced off the edge of the desk full-force to the tune of four stitches and many disappointed subscribers.

As a result, the fibrous ridge of skin under my chin is a constant reminder how I really could’ve used a nightstand that fateful morning. A means of keeping the alarm clock just slight out of easy reach so I would have had to step out of la-la land long enough to get a grasp on exactly what I was doing. A bedside table would have taken away the need for the cross-room solution and its chaotic and bloody consequences.

Preventive measures are yours to be had at nightstandselect.com, a division of Cymax Stores Online and a recommended means of ensuring peace of mind at your bedside. They offer a wide selection of night stands for any bedroom, understanding that choosing a bedside table needs to be based on both style and function considering the value it has to the start of your day and its end.

For years I told people a skate had come up and got me under the chin.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Repeat!

I recycle. I think at this point, most people do. Throwing an empty can or bottle into a regular old garbage can just feels wrong. I try to sort out my papers and plastics. The city was nice enough to give me a couple of blue bins, so it’s the least I can do. I rinse out tin cans, I flatten cardboard boxes, I reuse plastic shopping bags. I take public transportation or walk most places I need to go. I take short showers and leave the tap off when I brush my teeth. I would say that, for the most part, my carbon footprint is anywhere from a petite size 2 – 4. Not bad.

But I want to do more. Since I’m conscious of the environment and protecting the lovely Mother Earth, I would like to do more than my share in order to make up for people like my Uncle Murray who says, “Eh, I pay good money for someone else to do that” when it comes to recycling. Uncle Murray who, despite living in the mid-west, has a strong New Jersey accent. He believes that some sanitation worker painstakingly goes through his garbage (shudder) in an effort to separate the recyclables from the actual trash.

So what else can I do? After perusing the Cymax.com website, I have discovered that going green can be quite simple, as well as stylish. Take, for example, Tru Bamboo. These products, ranging from cutting boards to wine racks to canisters, are all made of 100% eco-friendly bamboo stock. These products aren’t killing any forests either; bamboo is a renewable resource, so as soon as bamboo is cut to make me a cool new set of cooking utensils, a new patch will grow back within a year. Suits me and the hungry pandas.

My other dilemma is food waste. I don’t want to flood the garbage bins with my eggshells and carrot tops, a compost would be an excellent investment. But I don’t want to touch garbage or anger my neighbors with the scent of rotting food wafting over the fence. Cymax carries composts from NatureMill that are super compact, easy to use (just lift the lid!) and mask the dirty garbage smell I would get from a plain old bucket.

That takes care of reuse and reduce, but what about recycle? Luckily, Cymax cares about the environment too, and carries a huge selection of pens, paper, files, and weekly appointment books all made from recycled materials. Who knew pens could be so environmentally friendly? Even without green ink (cough). As well, blue recycling bins are available to help your home or office err on the side of eco-friendly.

So, this glorious Earth Day, why not take a touchy-feely approach and think of all the things that this spiraling blue and green ball do for you. Take the time to send Mother Nature a thank you card in the form of waste and consumption reduction, and see how she repays you. Can’t see it? Look outside your window. Happy Earth Day!

Blogophobics! Do Not Be Afraid To Read This!

Most phobias I can understand. Agoraphobia: Fear of crowds – sure. Fear of small places – absolutely (my brother used to lock me in his tuba case when I was small enough, and as a result, I have a mild case of Claustrophobia). There are other phobias that I can understand: Acrophobia (fear of heights), Aviophobia (fear of flying), Mysophobia (fear of germs), Glossophobia (fear of public speaking), Enetophobia (fear of needles), and Brontophobia (fear of thunder and lightning). I know at least one person who suffers from at least one of these phobias… granted it is my dog that suffers from Brontophobia, but you catch my drift.

There was a news story this morning on the radio that peaked my interest in phobias, pushing me to instigate an internet task of researching the most uncommon phobias, featuring one phobia that has had me in a state of bewilderment all morning. Of course, everything you read on the internet is true, so my research is flawless…

10) Arachibutyrophobia: The fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth. To tell you the truth, I can understand this phobia. In my teens, I used to torment my dog by placing big globs of peanut butter on the roof of his mouth, and be entertained for a good half hour as he tried to get it off. The thought of that situation being reversed is enough to make my skin crawl, ever so slightly.

9) Chromatophobia: The fear of colors. Now, one in twelve men is colorblind. However, men who are colorblind don’t just see in black and white, but in various shades of colors. And I suppose black and white are colors too… so I guess nobody really gets off the hook for this one.

8) Dextrophobia: The fear of objects at the right side of the body. Now this kind of phobia troubles me. Again, you can’t really escape this one, unless you don’t include walls in the list of objects and can huddle against one, right side of your body flat against it, and stay there your whole life.

7) Plutophobia: The fear of wealth. I have one thing, and only one thing to say to these people: if you’re wealthy and it’s driving you into a panic, please contact me, and I will take some of your wealth off your hands – no questions asked.

6) Metrophobia: The fear of poetry. Okay, so there is some bad poetry out there, but a sonnet isn’t going to kill you, and although nobody really gets them, haikus are nice and short. Plus, Chaucer wasn’t so bad, was he? Not like anyone can understand the guy anyway…

5) Nomatophobia: The fear of names. Hmmm… let’s think about this for a minute. Would people suffering from Nomatophobia prefer to be addressed as “Hey you!” or is it just, as my research tells me, a result of the significance of the name? Change your name to something that has no root. Call your friends ridiculous names.

4) Phonemophobia: The fear of thinking. This one baffles me. These sufferers are uncomfortable with their own thoughts and may panic when new and unfamiliar thoughts come about. How’s that as an excuse for getting out of a brainstorming session at work? This one is pretty well thought-out, in my books.

3) Aulophobia: The fear of flutes. Okay. So let’s break this down: A flute is a woodwind instrument, but unlike other woodwinds, it doesn’t have a reed. I played saxophone for years, and placing my tongue against a reed always gave me the creeps, but a flute? You blow sideways through a hole, people! It doesn’t even have to touch your mouth! However, if you are an Aulophobic and are irrationally fearful of the look or sound of flutes, that is another thing… Advice? Pick up an electric guitar, crank the volume, and drown this phobia out.

2) Geniophobia: The fear of chins. Yes people: this is a true phobia. Now, I’ve seen some pretty nasty double (triple, quadruple) chins in my life, but only a handful have sent me running the other way. Geniophobics are scared of ALL chins – small, large, dimpled, chiseled – and are therefore a little unlucky when it comes to living every day life. I imagine this phobia goes hand in hand with Agoraphobia.

and now… big drum roll for the phobia of the day:

1) Koumpounophobia: The fear of buttons. Yup. Those evil, dirty, scary, horrific buttons – on your shirt, on your pants – but especially on their own. The fear of buttons affects one in 75,000 people.

This was the news story this morning. A twenty-two-year-old woman has come out to the media to talk about her fear of buttons. In her own words, “touching a button would be like touching a cockroach. It feels dirty, nasty and wrong.” She can’t be in a room with anyone who has buttons on their clothing, and of course she won’t wear them herself. Her boyfriend has to wear zippers.

I didn’t believe it; I just couldn’t fathom it, until I found endless websites devoted to Koumpounophobia. Sufferers from all over the world come together on the web to find support from other people who are affected. One girl wrote that the buttons with four holes are the worst, stating “imagine someone putting a button in a shallow puddle of water and you can see the water come through the holes,” she goes on to admit, “I’m shivering just thinking about it!”

I don’t mean to poke (much) fun at these people. Obviously it is an immobilizing phobia, and people need professional help. I’m no doctor or psychologist, but what I do know is that I lose a lot of buttons from my shirts, and because I’m lazy and because it takes me a full evening to sew a button back on, they end up in a pile on the top of my vanity set. Now, I hope that I never meet anyone who is a Koumpounophobic, not because I think they would be bad friends, but because I wouldn’t want them to come over and have a panic attack when they see my pile of loose buttons. Luckily, my vanity set has a ton of closed storage, where I can hide my pile, so as long as the Koumpounophobic doesn’t also suffer from an impulse to rifle through other people’s belongings, I’m sure we can get along just fine. After all, I have no problem with zippers.

The Room That Never Was

Because the basement of my childhood home was unfinished, my parents came up with a plan based on a series of DIY projects for my father in his spare time. He made a diagram of what the finished product would look like by dividing the basement into quadrants, mapping out the details in terms of priorities. The laundry room and dark room (my dad’s hobby was photography) would be built first; then the second bedroom; next a workroom for my dad (to be shared with the furnace) and a general play area for us kids; and finally, the rec room and a walk-in pantry (for my mother’s preserves).

It turned out that my dad didn’t have a lot of spare time. But gradually, over the course of three years, the dark room, laundry room and my sister’s new bedroom (at last! a room of my own) was rendered fully functional. The project was progressing slowly, but on still on track, until plans for the rec room underwent a sea change.

I have no idea where they found them, but one Saturday, my parents brought home eight larger-than-life cutouts displaying an Arabian Nights theme. Three of the posters depicted fanciful interpretations of domed buildings with minarets and the other five showed characters from the collected fairy tales, including a brightly clad dancing girl, Ali Baba standing in a cave of glittering jewels and a kissing couple on a flying carpet.

My mom had this great idea—part of the rec room would be transformed into a fairy tale version of the exotic Middle East. The cutouts would be used to create a partition between the TV room and the party room; some of them would also decorate the walls in lieu of pictures. A home bar would be added, and in keeping with the posters, the decor would include large, colorful floor cushions, a low, curvy chaise lounge in a very bright shade and sections of gauzy, veil-like curtains to add ambiance. My mother had outlined this whimsical party room in such detail that she made me envision it too.

I could hardly wait! Forget the adults—it would be a great place to hang out with friends and have birthday parties. Finally, the basement was completed, including the rec room. My mother had arranged the space so that the home bar could still be added at a later date when time allowed. The rec room was great—I hung out with friends, watched TV with my sister and did homework at the communal desk.

But the magical, whimsical, fanciful exotic Middle East-themed party room never materialized. For awhile, the cardboard cutouts informally decorated the basement (translation, they were leaned against the walls and moved from place to place whenever they got in our way). Eventually, the colors faded, a couple of them simply disintegrated and were discarded, and the rest were dismantled and stored out of sight. Upstairs, just off the dining room, a large wood tea cart did double duty as a wine/drinks cart.

A very quick, very informal and very unscientific poll of unsuspecting volunteers in the Cymax lunch room and fax machine area revealed that a fair number of my co-workers do not store their wine and/or spirits in a piece of furniture specifically designed for that purpose. The kitchen cupboard was the hands-down winner at 21. The second most popular place to store any type of alcohol, at 10 votes, was the fridge. Five stated that they would bring a bottle of something home for a special occasion, but they didn’t make a habit of keeping any on hand. One person admitted to hiding a bottle of booze in his sock drawer—but I’m pretty sure he was joking.

Only 11of my co-workers polled for their opinion had some form of wine furniture in their homes. At 7 votes, the hands-down winner of that part of the survey was the all-purpose wine rack. (One person confessed to using said wine rack for “bubbly, fizzy, fruity non-alcoholic drinks,” to which I replied that it still counted.) Of the remaining 4, one owned a wine cooler and the other 3 had liquor cabinets.

I didn’t include myself in the above (very informal unscientific) survey, but I am the proud owner of a nine-bottle wine rack (in a warm wood finish). My Christmas cheer is stored in, you guessed it, the kitchen cupboard farthest from the stove. I enjoy entertaining, and in the last two years, the frequency I have friends over for meals appears to be increasing. More and more, I find myself using my buffet as a home bar, but I have to be careful, since the hutch won’t allow the placement of taller bottles or my really cute ice bucket.

I’ll have to give it some thought. For all those future holidays and the many opportunities life in general brings for celebrating with food, wine and friends, I really would like a more formal place to entertain. Since living in an apartment totally negates any possibility of recreating my mother’s exotic Middle East-themed party room, an elegant liquor cabinet (with hidden casters) or a wine server with a built-in glass rack might be the perfect solution.

Beasts of Burden and the Beauty of Futile Resistance

At the turn of the turn of the twentieth century, horses the world over celebrated the advent of widespread application of the internal combustion engine. From whinnying to neighing to trotting about (kind of at a loss as to how horses celebrate here), the perennial beasts of burden were thrilled at the promise of no longer being forced to pull every ridiculous contraption those strange bipeds had come up with over the centuries. It’s easy to understand they were ecstatic at the promise of slowly becoming obsolete.

Still, there must have been the odd individual who preferred the carriage and his trusty equine friend, but for most the appeal of not sitting directly behind an animal that consumes a large quantity of fibrous food everyday (Rusty …. RUSTY!) and the sexiness of those new motorcars sent many a horse out to pasture – happily.

Here’s the thing – I may be a chronically frustrated and disillusioned musician, but I’m a musician nonetheless. Despite the rock n’ roll lifestyle dream slowly withering away, I still hold out a faint hope of one day receiving my first royalty. To that end, and more so because I simply love the tangibility of them, I’m one of the dying breed who still buy CDs. Napster be damned, I believe musicians should receive their due compensation and conversely I’m quite proud of my beyond-expansive CD collection. Though it appears inevitable that they are doomed to have the same legacy to music as the horse does for transport, I will be the aforementioned guy in the horse-drawn carriage staring disdainfully at the Model-T.

My CD collection? I’d say 600 plus qualifies as beyond expansive and it grows in small increments once or twice a month. Much to the aesthetic displeasure of my wife, it takes up a good portion of the wall space in our living room by being stored in all manner of racking; from six foot wooden towers to bare function plastic trays to the discs that are parked on the floor in the overflow lot. I’ll admit it’s a bit of an eyesore, but it’s part of me and, plain and simple, a CD collection speaks big-time cool.

I may, however, cave in to the better half’s décor wishes. I’m thinking a CD / DVD spinning tower or spinning media tower may be a more stylish and functional storage solution for my archaic medium and Cymax Stores Online features a large selection of entertainment library storage options at competitive prices. A standard CD tower or media tower and their against-wall orientation may be more suitable considering our space constraints. Either way, whichever media storage cabinet or CD storage rack I buy will need to be a large one as for as long as they keep making them I will keep buying them.

I’m sure those same horses are sympathizing with the millions of over-worked pistons and valves around the world holding out hope for the advent of perpetual motion. My wish for the devolution of the commercial music industry is about as likely.

Technicolor Memories and the Living Rainbow

My childhood home was a dream for anyone ten years old or younger. My parents built the home in a tiny, dusty town a three hour’s drive from the nearest large city. We had a diner, a grocery store, and two service stations – across the road from each other – and not much else. I hadn’t experienced fast food or shopping malls until we moved and I was nearly a teenager; perfect timing, don’t you think?

My parents built the house specifically with my brother and I in mind – if we were kept entertained, we’d be out of their way. The playroom in the basement was carpeted with multicolored squares to create a patchwork rainbow. There was a “hidden” room under the stairs that became our secret lair. The walls, with a stark white base, were encouraged to be made our own; several masterpieces and brilliant prose have surely long since been painted over. The best part of the house, however, was the backyard.

Painstakingly each spring, my mom and dad would plant the gardens. All around the perimeter were beautiful blooming flowers, teeming with ladybugs and dragonflies. Two apple trees sat in the middle, perfectly executed as a “home base” when playing tag, or makeshift goal posts. Raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb stained the corners red – along with every child’s face on our block. Near the back was a vegetable garden that produced every color of the rainbow: tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, peas, cabbage, carrots, onions, cucumbers, corn, and potatoes. It was all we ate in the summer and likely why I have such an aversion to frozen vegetables now. Once you’ve pulled a carrot and rinsed off the dirt with the garden hose, you can never settle for something shrink wrapped.

The inaugural gardening day usually took place in late April. Dad begrudgingly pulled down his cap and set to work – his job was the worst; he was in charge of bug and leaf removal. Mom brought out all her baby plants and flowers and dug new homes for them in the freshly fertilized soil. I watched from the sidelines, wondering how dead grass and gray dirt would ever become the garden I was accustomed to.

Before I knew it, the backyard was alive again and with the sun came the anticipation of apple pies and carrot cake to eat and bumblebees and butterflies to catch. I remember stuffing unlucky bugs into old yogurt cups to keep as pets, only to have my brother set them free in the evening. And my parents, sitting on their garden swing, illuminated by the watchful eye of the outdoor porch light, taking it all in, enjoying the fruits of their labor, sometimes literally.

As summer rounds the corner and dusk brings the scents of barbeque and the sounds of tag, I wonder if the people who moved into our old house twenty years ago maintained the backyard as my parents did. I wonder if they had children to play amongst the greens and yellows and reds as we had. And I wonder if I could still catch a butterfly.

Disposing Childhood Baggage

I am one of the most frugal people you’ll ever meet. I think part of it is a result of having to count pennies to buy milk each week when I was a kid. Part of it is in my genes though, too. For decades, my mother wore these terribly ugly, big, round Sally Jesse Raphael glasses with tacky red plastic frames. All three of us kids took turns trying to throw them away – I even stuffed them at the very bottom of the garbage can on my day to take out the trash – but low and behold, my mother found them and fished them right back out, and we were stuck with what we, at that time, thought was the most embarrassing, unfashionable mother in the world.

My father is the same. He had a plain white T-shirt from the 70s, which he wore well into the 90s, where it transgressed into an unbecoming grey, complete with oil spills and sweat stains. For years we tried to get him to chuck the thing out, but he kept saying that it was a perfectly good shirt, so why throw it away? On a momentous day, my father was hiking through the woods and got this shirt caught on a blackberry bush. With the T-shirt ripped up the side, all three of us kids felt blessed. But my father was a reduce-reuse-recycle kind of guy, well before the green wave came around, so the T-shirt was turned into a dog collar for about four years, then an oil rag for the old car he was restoring. I was over at my parents’ house a few weeks ago; my mother asked me to grab some cola from the garage, and there was the T-shirt turned cloth, in all its black, filthy glory. To my disgust, my mother still has those horrible glasses, but promises that she only uses them when she can’t find her regular reading ones (which I have a feeling is more often than I want to imagine).

Needless to say, although I don’t have ugly glasses, nor shirts that have lasted more than fifteen years (although I must admit, I DO have a few that have hit the ten year mark), I inherited the frugality gene, which at times is a blessing, but other times a bit annoying, especially when my partner wants to splurge on a trip to Vegas.

I’ve never been to Sin City, and didn’t think I ever wanted to go. I picture the city of Vegas to be one massive slot machine that opens up and sucks money right out of your pockets. To me, gambling seems like the most imprudent thing a person could do, but we need a weekend away, the flights were cheap (even I agreed with that) and my partner promises me that we will do other things than sit and gamble all day.

The temperature in Vegas during the month of June can get up past 100ºF, so we’re not planning on packing much at all. Bathing suits, a couple of pairs of shorts, shirts, and a light sweater for when we are inside with the air conditioning; maybe a nice outfit when we go out for my partner’s birthday dinner, but other than that, there really isn’t much to bring.

Nevertheless, we need new luggage. I have never owned a new suitcase or travel bag; I have always relied on hand-me-downs, but in my family, the chance of obtaining hand-me-downs doesn’t come around too often (and when they do, you can imagine the state of things passed on). The suitcases that we do have either have broken zippers, jammed up wheels, broken handles, or all three of these ailments. Plus, the suitcases are all black, and I can’t tell you how much time we have wasted in front of the conveyor belt at airports, watching black suitcase after black suitcase go around and around, people grabbing at them with the hope that it belongs to them, then throwing them carelessly back after reading the luggage tag with somebody else’s name and address.

We want sturdy, bright, and sensible luggage and accessories for this upcoming trip. With my aversion to paying too much for too little, we are looking at a ton of good quality, economical luggage sets from Cymax that fit our budget and make me feel as though I’m not throwing money away. Maybe with the savings I keep after purchasing my suitcases, I can afford to gamble a little bit. After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?

This is the Story of a Four Poster Bed

Every so often, my mother would venture downtown of the city I grew up in to shop in one of the major department stores for clothes and other items the family needed that could not be found elsewhere. I usually went along, since my presence was needed to try on clothes and help carry parcels. It was a precisely choreographed ritual: shopping first, then lunch at the store’s paddle wheel-themed restaurant, then a tour of the furniture department. Until I grew “too old,” (translation became a teenager) traipsing beside her looking at furnishings was my favorite mother-daughter outing.

Don’t laugh. She made it fun. She had great style and fashion sense. She’d share little comments about what she liked and didn’t like. She had sense of humor I didn’t appreciate until much later in life, but on these excursions, that is what I remember the most—laughing with my mom against a backdrop of bedroom, living room and dining room furniture groupings.

It was on just such an excursion that I fell in love. We had worked our way through the adult bedroom section and had turned a corner into the children’s area and there it was. My mother, who erroneously thought she still had my attention, continued chatting. On display was a complete French Provincial bedroom set in a creamy white finish with gold edging: a twin four poster bed with a pink, white and gold canopy, two nightstands, a double dresser, a chest of drawers, a writing desk with matching chair and a seat cushion in the same pattern as the canopy and a toy box/padded bench in pebbled white and gold material. I wanted it—all of it—the whole thing. It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen.

Mother had looked at the display and had already moved on. When she realized that I had grown roots and wasn’t budging, she backtracked. Until now, the largest thing I had ever asked for was a bike. After I had stated my request, she laughed…gently and then reminded me that: a) you’d need a very large room to fit all of the pieces on display into one place; b) I had a sister; and c) I shared a room with aforementioned sister.

I didn’t care. I wanted what I had seen. It was so beautiful I just knew that if I had a room that looked like that, it would change my life. I would be a different person; the world would be a better place.

With the single-minded intensity children possess at that age (I was nine), I embarked on a campaign of persuasion—the Battle of the French Provincial Bedroom Set had begun. At the end of the blitz, everyone---immediate family, relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers in the street knew what I wanted for Christmas.

Christmas Eve arrived. At bedtime, I was told that I had to sleep on the spare cot in my parents’ room since my sister seemed to be running a slight fever and my mother didn’t want me to getting sick too. I didn’t think anything of it—who can you trust if you can’t trust your mother?

On Christmas Day, before any presents were opened, it became quite clear to me that none of them were big enough to hold an entire bedroom suite, French Provincial or otherwise. And although, technically I hadn’t got what I most wanted, I received some pretty neat things. I didn’t say a word about canopy beds. When the living room had been tidied up, I was sent off to my room to get ready to go to my grandmother’s house.

I opened the bedroom door. And screamed. In the place of my old bed was a white four poster bed. No accompanying pieces of furniture; no canopy; no gold edging. I’m a fast learner—I asked for A and got B. End of story. Still, it was a bed of my own and in its own right, it was pretty impressive. It was Victorian, had pineapple tops, turned posts and bun feet. Actually, it was quite beautiful and comfortable. But secretly I harbored an unspoken grudge.

I grew up, I moved out, I moved on, but the bed always followed me. Over the course of several years, it became harder to reconcile a twin size white bed in a full grown woman’s bedroom. When I voiced this opinion to my mother, she said I could always have it restored to its original color. What? Its original color was white. Wasn’t it?

And that’s when the real story of the four poster bed was revealed. At nine, it never occurred to me that my parents simply didn’t have the money for a new bedroom set. They did the next best thing. They found a second hand four poster through a friend of a friend, whose mother was moving out of the home she had shared with her husband and into a small apartment. My bed had been brought from the Old Country by the senior woman’s parents, and my father told me, by his reckoning, must be just over a hundred years old. Made of solid mahogany, my father also mentioned that it broke his heart when he painted it white.

Eventually though, I did take my mother’s suggestion and had it stripped and restored to its original color, a golden coffee color with “light” in it. I had it professionally done and the restorer, after returning it to me in its refinished glory, offered me a great deal of money for it.

At last! I could get my revenge on this Victorian interpretation of a French Provincial dream. But I just couldn’t do it. The four poster bed, in some strange way, was still a connection, after all these years, to my mother, to her ingenuity, creativity and sense of humor. And that, I just couldn’t part with.

Double Oh #: A License to Accommodate

What’s the worst $14.75 (plus shipping and handling) that you’ve ever spent? As a typical twelve year old boy beginning to experience the thrush of puberty, few things could have been more inherently appealing than a certain ad I came across in the back pages of my X-men comic. A pair of good looking shades that would not only fit my burgeoning identity but also featured an X-Ray function to see through all manner of animate and inanimate material as I saw fit!

My dad scoffed a little, but I wish he had taken a little more than a “hey, it’s your paper route money” attitude as the bank teller changed my 20$ bill into a money order. Several weeks later, I received a pair of flimsy plastic, ray-ban themed shades with pathetically matching black plastic lenses and an “instruction pamphlet” that did nothing more than rub salt into the wound. Pops just smiled as I complained at length. No response, just a big old grin.

When it comes to products that served dual purposes, no one had it better than James Bond. Wouldn’t you agree? He had a wristwatch with an ultra practical garrote wire for those times when the comparative quiet of asphyxiation was preferable. Who wouldn’t want a pair of suspenders with a built-in grappling cord for when there’s no other way out of the building than down the side of it? His Mont Blanc fountain pen with its most appealing nitric acid dart function was the stuff of envy. 007 had the best in multi-function items, including my personal favorite – the .30 caliber ski pole from The Spy Who Loved Me. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think about it at some point nearly every time I’m on the hill.

Unfortunately, most of us have to settle for more commonplace applications of hybrid function technology, but that’s not to say there aren’t a few gems out there. While both the common man and a secret agent could appreciate the practicality of a compass watch or maybe even an am / fm flashlight, I’m thinking more domestically here. Few things are more practical and welcome in the home than a sleeper sofa, and here in the 21st century we’re fortunate enough to be able to peruse Cymax Stores Online and their large and competitively priced selection of convertible sofas from home. Versatility is the key, and the ability to tuck a children’s sleeper chair or an adult sleeper chair into a storage space and pull it out when guests necessitate its use is sure to be a welcome application for both yourself and your extended family. The same can be said for a children’s sleeper sofa in its being a most useful convenience for older or larger youth who need a little more space during the sleepovers that all kids insist on having from time to time.

The ability to accommodate your guests comfortably with a sofa bed is a reassurance that appeals to all who don’t have the luxury of an additional guest room, or one at all, in their home. A comfortable and suitably spacious place to repose and sleep well is sure to be provided with one from Cymax Stores. The model that is not only a sofa and a bed, but a submersible escape pod with satellite-guided armaments?

You’ll have to talk to Q at MI6 about that one.