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- Doctor Medved was a funny sort of guy. I wanted to write *man* there,
- but I couldn't. That's not what he was. He was a guy.
- There's nothing wrong with that, but you know, someone gets tired of
- feet-on-the-desk-cheap-beer-in-the-fridge-birds-in-the-thicket kind
- of living. That's why I left Doctor Medved that day, back in the summer
- of Ten-and-Seven Sorrows.
- I remember it like it was yesterday. "There's something wrong with this
- birdhouse," he said, fidgeting with his toolset, in between grunts of
- exertion and aggravation. "It's not housing properly."
- "It doesn't take much to house," I told him. "I actually house rather
- often."
- "Well..." he said, and dropped the wrench. "What is it that you house?"
- "Right now?" I said, and leaned backwards, considering the slow-moving
- clouds and nearly dropping the mint julep that perspired in my cold
- clammy hand. "Well, right now I think I must house serenity and
- melancholy."
- "Like a pond?" He was one of those guys who couldn't concieve of
- serenity. Everything he knew about serenity he read in faux-Asian
- pamphlets and TV Guide blurbs about Bruce Lee. He wouldn't know a
- Zen garden from the Cottington School for Boys.
- "Serenity is like when you're drunk, and you sit down on the curb
- and let the sound of the bar disappear and you feel the curb and the
- cold grit of the asphalt and the warm weave of your coat and the slow
- growth of your hair that you keep forgetting to shave and you forget
- that you're the only one drinking to remember and not forget. Serenity
- is the cold air that comes in the almost-closed car window as you travel,
- slowly in all but speed, from a place you don't really belong to a place
- you don't really want to go to. Serenity is finding a kitten and saying
- hello and asking it how it is and showing it a good time with some tin
- cans and plastic tea cups and boxing magazines and then leaving it
- where it was without bringing it home to your mother (or mother-substitute
- that you fuck in a way you deny is Freudian) and trying to own it.
- Those things are serenity."
- Doctor Medved picked up the tool again and began making the birdhouse
- into a bird-house. "Serenity is getting back to an empty apartment when
- everyone is gone and the bags make the scratchy plastic noise as you
- take the milk into the fridge and pause for just a moment?"
- "No, not at all," I said as I stood up and left. "That's not it at all."
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