I'm The Best...Around

I spent the better portion of Tuesday finally getting around to doing my spring cleaning.
It was kind of a pain, and it took longer than I had expected it to, but at least now the place is reasonably clean, so for the foreseeable future all I have to worry about is the usual build up of clutter (junk mail, empty grocery bags, etc.), and the usual maintenance.
As I cleaned the place I was struck, as I often am, by the overall lack of décor.
Sure, there are a few pictures hanging here and there, but for the most part my walls are bare, my lifestyle appears rather spartan, and in general my apartment is just as lacking in the personalization department as it was when I moved in almost two and a half years ago.
I suppose there are a lot of reasons for that.
For one thing, I don’t have a lot of photographs. I just plain don’t own very many. I’ve never been one to take pictures. The only time I really had many pictures was back when I was married, and I didn’t really hold on to any of those after things ended.
I’ve got the nieces and nephews up on the refrigerator, and some family pictures on my desk, but that’s pretty much it.
These are the current contents of my walls: two of my drawings of Britney Spears; a mirror; a print of the sketch “Abundance” by Botticelli; a clock (in the kitchen); an Alex Ross calendar; a cheesy foil painting (in the bathroom); a poster of Elektra by Greg Horn; a black and white photograph of two women kissing entitled “Kiss.”
So I don’t have much in the way of photographs and assorted knickknacks to begin with, and after paying the bills, feeding myself, and making the occasional major electronics purchase I don’t usually have much money lying around with which to purchase more.
And of course if I do have money to spend on home décor items I’m not especially inclined to actually do so.
That’s mostly because it seems like a waste of money (like bedding, most items of décor don’t have much in the way of gimmicky features), and the fact of the matter is that, thanks to the nature of renting I can never be certain how much longer I’m going to live here.
After all, there’s the distinct possibility that when the lease comes up for renewal, rent will be raised to a level that I’m either unwilling or unable to pay and I’ll be forced to move…with that much more junk to have to haul around thanks to my decorating efforts.
Of course, just as permanence is an illusion, maybe impermanence is also an illusion. After all, it seems unlikely that I’ll be going anywhere anytime real soon, so there could be some value in investing in items designed to make my home feel more like home.
But that leads us inexorably to the question of “why.”
Why should I bother decorating the place? It’s a rare thing indeed for me to have company, so if I were prettying up the place it would, presumably, be for my own benefit, and I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t care enough for it to be worth the effort.
After all, I’m not going to manage to impress myself.
My brother Brad goes through a lot of trouble to beautify his living space, even though it’s just him and his dogs, but while his place does look nice (or at least it always has; I haven’t seen where he’s living now), I just can’t see it as being worth the time and effort if I’m the only one who’s going to get to appreciate it.
And if by some miracle (and at this point we’re probably talking about a parting the Red Sea class miracle) I were to meet a woman, the odds are she would want to put her own indelible stamp onto my home a la the “woman’s touch.”
So I guess the whole point of this is décor, shmécor.
On that note, I do have to say that my new bedding was incredibly comfortable.
Still too damned expensive, though…
Chris, one of the people I work with, is into karate, to the extent that he flies all around the country to compete in tournaments. Naturally the rest of us make endless (and merciless) “Karate Kid” comments to and about him.
One of the more pervasive of late has been about the extremely cheesy “You're the best ... around ... nothing's ever gonna keep you down!” montage from the original movie.
Brian, Scott, Kathleen, and I all make frequent comments about it, and have gone so far as to download the song just to play it for Chris’ benefit (or, perhaps more accurately, humiliation).
Of course, the side-effect is that periodically all of us have “You're the best ... around ... nothing's ever gonna keep you down” stuck in our heads.
The frequency of that occurring has been increasing for me. For example, last Friday morning while I was working out and struggling on the shoulder press, I could hear strains of singer Joe Esposito informing me that I am, in fact, the best…around, and that nothing is ever going to keep me down.
This wasn’t so much inspirational as it was irritating as hell.
Still, it did occur to me that it would be cool if life could work like a sports training montage.
I mean, how cool would it be if time could just whiz by like that, giving you maximum returns for minimum effort?
The stirring music would swell up and we’d see quick cuts of me working out, struggling to send that stack of weights up, and slowly, but surely, making more and more progress, or drinking some disgusting-looking health drink, and all of it interspersed with shots of me making time with my hot new girlfriend, who had formerly dated my biggest rival, though she’s now seen him for the jerk that he is and has fallen for my sweet, if slightly goofy charm, and at the end of it all I’m totally buff.
That would be a total of like a minute and a half of actual exercise and at the end I’d look like the cover model for “Men’s Health.” It would be the next best thing to being bitten by a radioactive spider or saying “Shazam” and getting hit by a bolt of lightning.
Of course, if I had to pick a cheesy 80’s anthem to be the soundtrack to my montage, I think I’d be more likely to go with Sammy Hagar’s “Over the Top.”
In any case, there are a few things I want to do with the waning hours of my last day off, so that’ll do it for now, though I may be back later with a final thought for the week.