I had returned home tired and somewhat disoriented from my week long hike into the cold and hostile Icelandic backcountry to discover that my wife had left me and taken most of what I thought were my earthly possessions. Our marriage had grown dull and lust less over the past few years. The spark in our eyes had dimmed and was but a twinkling shard of glass from a bottle of pain-drowning-moonshine buried in a landfill reflecting the light of a flashlight looking for a way out. I had never before been interested in exploring the mountains I saw everyday through my window. Covered in snow and sparsley populated by unknown and thus potentially dangerous fauna I thought it would be best to stay away and never think about them as more than a beautiful painting of some distant land hanging on my wall. I did envy for a long time the painter who could see such beauty in such as scary place, and was brave enough to it venture.
That was only until about a month ago when I turned from my plasma on a commercial break during a Rambo marathon on TBS that the snow that covered those mountains looked soft and light and more inviting than my bed where my wife laid heavy every night. Her skin I hadn’t touched in years but it looked dry and rough. The peaks of the mountains, reaching for the sun looked warmer than her peaks which over the years had been slowly sinking into the undulating valley at her center. I drink a bottle of South Co. as I write this. The asperous, sweet taste mixes with the vile from my stomach that sneaks up my esophagus due to my hiatus hernia almost inducing a gag reflex with every gulp I take. My life had gone down the pipes and I could almost hear the neighbors whispering about it. I should feel ashamed and maybe that nausea is partly caused by the stink of my life, but really, I feel relieved, lighter. I don’t quite have a face to show my friends and family at the moment but in the mirror, my face looks not as long, not a gray and dare I say, not as ugly as before. I have life ahead of me. I may now find joy and pleasure in the booze and women I sought before for distractions from the pain. In truth it was the dregs of society that I acquainted myself with those nights when I couldn’t face the inhospitable place that had become my home.
My plasma, which sits in a corner of the living room rejected by my wife for she probably couldn’t bare to carry or benefit from that device which she blames for the miseries in her life, had been my truest link to the outside world. Or at least a world not painted in hues of gray and tears. For years now, this being Iceland and my wife being my wife, I hadn’t seen the knees of a woman except for that show with the anorexic lawyer let alone any other more appealing parts like the ones I could see on MTV as they were abundantly displayed on those spoken word videos about the blinb-bling and hoes… whatever those things might be. My plasma had been my escape and the only thing keeping me from burying myself up to the neck and having my milk goat stomp me on the head to death. My bottle of liquor is almost finished and I begin to think that being friendly would cause the world to be friendly in return, but I know that is just an intoxicated fantasy.
I do however realize I am now free to see the exoticisms of the world in real life. Such strange things to Iceland as that flowery tavern, the Copacabana, which has events where the short and tanned owners would be bringing you sexy micro bikinis and sexy Brazilian thongs and swimwear since 2003! Until today, I had only seen the pictures on the advertisements on the local newsletter I used to put underneath the pillow case of my wife’s pillow to safe keep it from her drool. And much like the mountains outside my window, those pictures I thought would be better left as just that. Today; however, after tapping out the last drops of South Co. into my gullet I felt something in my pants I hadn’t quite experienced for some years now. It was a clue and it pointed there, to the Copacabana, to the neon lit street just outside town… to the air yard where I may shoot some disoriented ducks that came here looking for a warmer place… stoopid Canadian ducks.
