The compromise

I am sitting in a room that feels comfortable. This is the former one bedroom apartment on the third floor of my house. When I bought this old place, I turned this into my bedroom. It has old wood floors, a couple of windows that look down onto the street and a window on either side that look onto neighbors rooftops. It can be seductively quiet up here, miles above the ghetto opera that takes place down below my windows.

Last year about this time I removed years of old paint and wallpaper and got the old plaster looking spiffy. I left the wood floors alone, enjoying the look of years of quiet use. There is a tiny bathroom up here, I dragged a claw foot tub up, added black and white tile to the floor, a new small cabinet with sink and the tiny bathroom became a haven on cold winter nights. It's kind of amazing what happens in a small room, with a hot bath and a single candle.

Over this past winter I removed all the stuff from my bedroom, except the bed. Once I got rid of the bookcase and computer table, the chair and the end table, the room looked large and empty, which was kind of nice. The walls were a light gray and I started hanging art. I have a lot of art; friends, gifts from friends and lovers, people I have interviewed and work I have purchased. I started hanging work in the alcove and near the windows, I moved the bed into a cave-like corner, but surrounded it with bright and beautiful pieces, so it was inviting and fun.

I was thinking recently of my favorite bed. It was actually a couch, which is technically not a bed at all, but if you think about it, a bed really is whatever we decide to make it. I have used many a car seat as a bed, a blanket can make a wonderful bed when placed delicately on a beach, I slept on a street in Berlin, which was my bed for six hours, when I was terribly sick a few years ago I used to pass out on Seattle streets for hours at a time, bed like conditions. A bed is a bed. The best bed of my life was an old green brocade couch, solid, probably 15 years old when I bought it at a thrift store in Ventura California. A friend lent me his truck, I brought it to my parents house, dragged it into my bedroom and took a nap. For about six months, that couch was my bed, and for the rest of my life, I will be in search of a bed as comfortable as that couch.

I am now surrounded by beautiful art in my bedroom, art I love. It's got me thinking about compromises people make in bedrooms. I dated this actress in LA before I went back to college in New York. She was good to go, a wild streak that was as wide as Sunset Boulevard. Her parents were boozers, her dad, a one legged piano player who, as the night wore on and he got drunker, would get bawdier and bawdier at the piano, inging songs about whores and the things their bodies could do. It was a sight. Around that time I got a job with an opera company in Long Beach and I was working on the sets in an old abandoned movie theatre. During a break a friend and I stumbled upon a couple of boxes of folded up old movie posters. We put them in my car and when I got back to my apartment, I went about plastering my bedroom wall with classic posters from the top movies from the 60's and 70's. I was in my early 20's and my bedroom was by far the most amazing bedroom in the history of the world. When my actress girlfriend saw it that night, she was appalled and made sure I understood that I was apparently a 13 year old nerd.

The posters disappeared soon after. So did she.

I think we need art to remind us that beauty is attainable. The great thing about art is that we almost always get to define it for ourselves. Or sure, there are these self important bloated intellectuals who will spew words of wisdom and stuff, but really, often times, what it comes down to is art has the same Supreme Court definition as does porn, I may not be able to describe it, but I know it when I see it.

When I first moved to Seattle I found myself walking past a gallery late one night. There was a small party inside, and there was rain outside, so soon enough I was inside, pretending to belong, enjoying the art with my glass of wine and look of distinction. A man approached and asked if there was any piece in particular that I liked, we walked a few feet and then I accidentally fell in love. On my right, previously out of my vision, was a fairly large canvas, seemingly four patterns emerging, each one trying to tell a detailed story of some sort. I was entangled in the first quadrant when I noticed the envelope in the bottom corner, was that really an envelope. I kept looking, things that made sense at first, started to not make sense at all. A man looking out a window became a prisoner committing suicide in his jail cell. As I stepped back, I was blown away by how much information I felt coming at me, messages and images all hitting my cerebral cortex at the same time, lighting my brain on fire. It was love and it felt good.

"That one is 750. It's kind of great," the man, who I guess was attached to the gallery in some way, said to me.

"Yeah, it is," I stammered. At the time, 750 was three months rent. 750 would have purchased me a car, if I could have purchased a car. 750 would have bought be 10 bikes. That much made sense. I looked at that painting like a lover I knew I needed, but one that did not notice me. I finished my wine and left.

Ten years later I was taking part in an open studio tour in the old Rainier Brewing building in the Georgetown area of Seattle. At that time I was, I am searching for the right term here, hectic. Hectic is a good word, maybe impatient, I was hectic and impatient. Probably in need of rehab of some sort. I finished whatever it was I was doing and I walked around the various studios in the complex and a name on a door caught my eye. I am not sure why it did, but when I saw it I instinctively walked to the door and knocked, a voice inside said come in. A young looking man, in great physical shape and with a mop of bright red hair came walking up and extended his hand. He said his name, which was the name on the door and I explained to him that many years before, I had stumbled into a gallery and I had fallen in love with one of his paintings.

I am not sure how long we talked. I know we went to dinner, we both rode bicycles to Ballard and ate at a communal Mexican restaurant. We rode back, stopping on Capitol Hill for a beer at The Comet and walking around Cal Anderson Park, talking about the trajectory of satellites and proper hair care.

On the wall of my bedroom, opposite my bed, a place I look at whenever I wake up, is that painting from that gallery, from that artist I met a long time ago.

Which is why I think about the compromises we make in bedrooms, because for many years this painting that I love and that inspires me with passion and wisdom, has been stored on a wall in a dining room I rarely even enter. Only after my winter of disconnect did I think to move it up to my bedroom and allow it to overtake me again. I had compromised my own love of this artwork for fear of alienating whatever psychopathic lover I was probably dining with.

That in itself is a problem, because one should spend as little time dining with psychopaths as possible. The other problem, the real trouble, is allowing compromises in a bedroom that take away from ones own passion. When you think about the time we spend in our bedrooms, sleep time, love time, reading time, resting time, even writing blog post times, we spend a lot of time in our respective bedrooms and to not have it be comfortable and enticing and full of wonder and delight seems like a waste.

Removing the stuff from the room was the first step. Emptying the room of all the books and junk that seemed to be filling the space allowed me to understand what I had to work with. It also cleared all the walls and helped me to realize that this space, these walls that are mine, needed to be a place that I would feel comfortable and respected. A space to call my own and a place that spoke to me in a language I understood and for me, beautiful art touches me in a way that nothing else does.