Some evenings I share my apartment with a melancholy beast.
He was here when I moved in, so I suppose the place is as much his as it is mine. It's a small price to pay for some quiet company.
I don't know where he goes when he's not around. He'll be gone for days or weeks, and then I discover this useless, brooding, melancholy beast lying like a lump on the couch one day.
Sometimes I try to get him to DO SOMETHING, or at least move over and share the couch. It's a very comfortable couch, and I'm not afraid to go toe to toe against the massive bastard for the preferred crash spot... he's a pushover.
Mostly I just bribe him with with beer to keep quiet, and keep him away from the cutlery.
It's not all bad though. He has a weak spot for highly cinematic romantic tragedies. By cinematic, I mean movies, as opposed to the new meaning which painfully suggests making literature into film. And by romantic tragedies, I mean pseudo-intellectual melodramatic foreign films. He sips his beer and silently revels in empathizing with people dealing with crushing emotional situations. His eyes well up with emotion as he tries to be something other than melancholy, and I just laugh at the silly bastard.
I don't let him watch comedies anymore. I've had to repair the furniture one too many times, and I'm afraid that the tv's the next thing to go.
Sometimes I wonder if in the past, when ancient physicians named the imbalances of the humors as sanguine, choleric, phlematic and melancholic, had they also met my beastly friend?
He never talks about himself... he could very well have been crashing on Hippocrates' couch once upon a time. One never knows how long a melancholy thing lives?
He's been on vacation lately. This makes my evenings spent alone, watching those wrenching, cathartic films that seem to accumulate at my place slightly lonely. Or perhaps boring.
I think I may just go mope at someone else's place.
tags: melancholy beast houseguest humors
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