Laundry Mountain Finally has a Soundtrack

I'm typing this on an old chair in my basement. At my feet lies a low range of unfolded denim mountains and sloping terry cloth hills running all the way into the laundry room. I hope one day to scale those hills, to raze them into a perfect unadulterated plane of nothingness. But for now they mock me. They are in fact laughing at me because not only am I incapable of reducing these mountains into molehills and less, I am currently reduced to sitting on this hideous old chair and listening to a YouTube video of the Amazon jungle while my daughter does virtual laps on the treadmill for her class project, the 'transcendental challenge'.

I would love to be upstairs where the boychild is finally playing his brand new version of metal death worship, Call of Duty: World at War which I see as a training video for future corporate sponsored slaughter. It's kind of like Ender's Game playing out in real life. But I digress.

Both of my kids are somewhat terrified of our basement. They used to be perfectly fine until their cousin lived with us for a while in a room in the basement which she swears was haunted because late at night she could hear someone playing guitar. I think if you've got a haunt going on, and it plays guitar instead of asking you for your soul or clanking chains, that's a pretty good ghost. That's like some kind of double bonus, like if you found Bigfoot and he says "Hey, want to see something really weird?" and introduces you to his gay twin brother.

So they're scared of the basement and will only go down there in the daytime or with the dog or with an adult sporting loaded .45 automatics and a grenade.

So I figured since I'm down here, I'd give you a live moment by moment account of my life here: I'm in the basement staring into the foothills of mount domestica; the kid is finally getting into his newest slaughterfest, [My Attorney] is working on some kind of tangled legality at such a level of minutiae and detail you would need the Large Hadron Collider to surpass it; my daughter is listening to bird calls and monkeys while running a treadmill and writing down her thoughts about it every 20 minutes; and my gay dog is licking my toes. Again.

In my fantasy world as a noble literary giant, I am not embedded in the bedding in the basement, but sitting on a panel discussion at a convention of lexicographers who are impressed by my new word constructions and are about to give me an award, the Golden Dictionary, and a bottle of Balvenye and a box of cigars. Or I'm stepping onto the steppe in Veranasi and some kid offers me a glass of fresh chai and I'm wearing a white linen suit and my hand-made leather writer's bag and a stingy brim trilby and Johnny Depp walks up to me and asks me to sign his dog-eared copy of my best selling novel and says "Nice hat, man."

Or I'm sitting in my basement and the laundry . . . is . . . done.