The Living Room

He polished the beer dry, the green bottle gleamed in the darkness of his living room triumphantly. That is how it should be done, he thought, beer should never be warm. People should never talk and drink at the same time that will only bring out the shit from the beer. Beer is as shitty as it gets if it’s warm, toast as a bone.

He smiled with his numbing face as he nodded to himself in the dark. The first beer always gets him in the face. His head nodding to the rhythm in his earphones as the clear crisp guitar scratched eight times on the seven and nine frets to the explosive bass drums. Of the beat to A Certain Romance.

‘God.’ He smiled to himself, ‘Arctic Monkeys should play in my wedding.’

He was in the living room, in front of youtube at his dinning table. It was midnight and so he had used the earphones. He had finished cleaning up the house when he decided he needed a beer, regardless if he had a buddy or not. It was hot and the beers were freezing in the fridge and he had finished sweeping the floor and mopping after mopping with soap and he had had his shower and he was alone and nobody is going to drink anything out from his fridge for the entire week.

The living room was dark because he had wanted to save electricity. Two people are paying for the fee of five people and that’s just crazy talk. He wished it was the afternoon and so he could unplug the earphones and let Andy Nicholson’s bass burstfire and ricochet off his purple walls. Instead he had to settle in playing air guitar and dance the forbidden dance that nobody are allowed to see in the confine of his chair.

The first beer warmed up him enough to write. Write what? Anything! He just needed the focus to keep his fingers tapping the scores away at the keyboard; otherwise they will just stick to swimming off in the air to the voice of Alex Turner. So he typed out one page detailing to the details of his afternoon cleaning every corner of his house. Then the first beer asked him to ask himself what’s the point. He shrugged while nodding to snare drums of ‘Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…’ deleted the entry and begun a new one about brushing his teeth. Twenty words through and he wondered about boredom of teeth brushing but went on anyway because he had loved the constant drumming of his fingers across the keyboard and the guitar riffs in his ears. He soon scrapped away that entry too, scratched his numbing face and started a new one about enjoying cold beer after cleaning the house. He would write about the wonderful music of Arctic Monkeys and write about him writing.

When he was bored and his fingers tired from making nonsensical entries, he shut off the laptop at his dinning table and jumped into the corner of his very red couch, flicked on the table lamp and read Andre Dubus. He would read until he fell asleep on his numbing face to his first beer. His fingers aching of typing, his neck complaining from nodding with his ears, his shoulders ruining from the mopping and his eyes will open again to his living room when she returns from her night shift.