Top o' the Year to ya!

2006 ended with my air mattress springing a leak. Before turning in this evening, the last of the year, I used the pump provided with my inflatable sleeping convenience to achieve a comfortable firmness in the thing, and then woke up some hours later to find myself in the beginnings of a rubberized foxhole. I made this discovery at 11:55 PM, December 31st, 2006.

It’s really my fault, though. I mean, I’m an eighth of a ton of fighting American male, and it’s a mass-produced balloon. Of course over-inflating would lead to stress on its fabric and seams, causing the leak, the actual location of which has so far eluded me. But it’s there, leaking out precious air molecules.

I bought the thing just over a week ago, and I was hoping to get at least a couple of months of use out of it. And now it’s just another warning that I should probably lose weight.

I could spin the air-mattress into a metaphor for my life, and not just this past year. The high hopes at the beginning, the progress of some plan that at first goes swimmingly, the beginnings of failure caused by a combination of personal errors and flaws in design, the inevitable end finding me laying on a hard floor on top of a sadly deflated sleeping balloon. You know, that old chestnut.

The hell with that. It’s a cheap air-mattress, not a metaphor for the Grand Design of the Universe, or the path I tread therein. Even if it is, I don’t care. The year’s over. The year’s begun. It was a hell of a year, the one behind, in many senses of the word; and I have no reason not to think the coming year won’t be a hell of a year in its own right. The future, as always, is upon all of us, waiting for each of us to commit those actions which, woven together, form our existence. That last sentence was right purty, if I do say so myself.

In Watchmen, Alan Moore has one of his characters, Ozymandias, who has committed a great crime in what he sees as the service of humanity, ask another character, Dr. Manhattan, if his actions were correct, in the end. And Ozymandias is told that nothing ever really ends.

The air-mattress is just an air-mattress, like Freud said. It won’t be a metaphor for anything, just an object lesson about not buying cheap inflatables. It’ll do.

Happy New Year.