Posters
As of last Saturday afternoon my room has more Morrissey posters than windows, which is to say one Morrissey poster, hung above a couch just large enough to uncomfortably accommodate someone too drunk to walk home and okay waking up with no natural indication of what time it may or, given a pitch black’s room tendency to eradicate all notion of space and shape, not be, like maybe this is finally the time that passing out with the spins led you to choke to death on that midnight Monterey Jack Taquito and now here you are, in a time-less black hell that just as you expected reeks strongly of stale Doritos and REM-sleep sweat and Monterey Jack Taquito vomit and oh wait, you made it to another sunrise, albeit one that you cannot see, what time is it, oh, it is 4:06pm.
Unless you’re willing to consider an irregular mountain of trash and old socks as a sort of modern art piece playfully exaggerating the “gross person” lifestyle, I have never been much of an interior decorator—music’s always been ephemeral for me (i.e. if you were to maliciously pour your Sprite on my laptop I would no longer “own” any songs) and by extension I’ve never really owned any posters, and also I hate art and have never seen a movie, so mass-produced representations of those (respectively) despicable and mysterious mediums aren’t coming anywhere near my walls.
But: The Morrisey poster. Some things about the poster. First off: It is not a poster. Do you need someone to give you the Heimlich, or can I go on, or better yet come over there and do it myself. Anyway: In high school I’d periodically babysit these two kids from down the street. They were both troubled—one was reticent and got teased at school, the other had learning disabilities—but we had fun together, if only because it probably felt good to beat a high school kid in basketball without his even trying to lose. About halfway through my time there the father moved out and the mother started dating and collaborating with the author of a series of self-help books, who may or may not have influenced her decision to one night give me, along with my pay, a box of aging ’80s vinyl—prime college rock that Pitchfork ‘Best-Of’ lists had already familiarized me with at least the reputations of, early R.E.M., Psychocandy, a De La Soul seven-inch.
I carted these relics of some other guy’s (possibly) happier days with me to college, entertaining vague notions of impressing floormates with my “extensive collection of useless plastic” while “stroking the beard that I’d surely have by then.” Instead they just sort of sat there, temporarily freed from the closet of a broken home only to watch me fumble awkwardly from a variety of vantage points in the many rooms I’ve called home/”unpleasant-smelling sadness receptacles” since matriculating around the time Obama was elected.
Until, that is, a few days ago, when the oppressive blankness of windowless walls led me to thumbtack my copy of Viva Hate above the couch, thereby turning me into the kind of guy who:
a) uses vinyl records as decoration (which I personally have no problem with, but which I get the sense is the sort of thing people sneer at, when will I stop caring about these sorts of things)
b) has a picture of Morrissey on his wall (and don’t get me wrong, I love the Smiths as much as the next unlovable guy or girl, but if the purpose of a poster is in part to communicate something about the inner life of whoever bought it and hung it up, then all a Morrissey poster can really convey is a cliched notion of artistic/romantic loneliness/misanthropy, and like every other person who dresses like and listens to the same music as millions of other people, I’d never want to come off as unoriginal, as having an unrefined sense of hipness)
c) has a Morrissey record he’s never heard taped to his wall (in this situation I guess like wearing a Public Image Ltd. shit when you’re only familiar with the Sex Pistols) and
d) has a Morrisey record he’s never heard taped to one wall of his windowless room, which by the way what time is it, everyday is like Sunday in here because everyday is the same.
