Steve’s macho bachelor floorbed escapade
Here is some rapid-fire backstory for you: I’m getting married.
Yep. No typos. Someone in our modern, pattern-functioning society looked at this college humor columnist with the physique of an overused down feather body pillow and actually said, “I want to coexist with that.”
Miracles happen, America.
In case you aren’t aware, the engagement portion of the whole majestic travail of matrimony is one of the more stressful parts of the commitment. After plans, booking, informing relatives and registering at stores which you, as a dude, thought only sold candles, you learn wedding planning takes quite the lump sum of time.
Now believe me, this isn’t sour grapes – I mean, it’d better not be, because overripe grapes will ruin the sorbet and we worked so hard to have a sorbet that is both tasty and matches the welcome rug quilt arrangement for the guests to sign – but the toughest fact in this process is for the dude in wait to filter out what dude stuff the dude will have to let go of. This is why any soon-to-be expensive ring consolidators need consider this advice: Enjoy the guy stuff now. All of it. Take nothing for bravado granted.
I’ll share an example, and then you’ll understand, because dude stuff is easy to relate to. Sure, perhaps our adventures in machismo come in very different forms, but trust me when I say you’ll be fully on board when I tell you about floorbed.
It started almost two years ago. I walked into my bedroom at an entirely unholy hour because I was out at Wal-Mart for an emergency purchase – “purchase” in this case clarified to mean, “We were out of ice cream sandwiches,” – and attempted to settle in for a short slumber before an early rise.
Sure, it seemed simple. It was a few easy steps: find a mattress, slip your embodiment on top of said mattress, apply extruded fabric to the top of embodiment if need be, then commence to temporary comatose and dreaming about meeting Omar Gooding from “Wild and Crazy Kids.”
But you see, here’s the thing. I was fresh off of half my weight in ice cream sandwiches and a bustling ten-minute drive in – and I refuse to put this mildly – some slush. In as many ways as one can surmise, my body was soaking in emotional gravity like a sudden breakup, or any episode of “7th Heaven.”
To put it in verbiage y’all 18-year-olds can understand, I was “Soooo tired” – it’s four Os, right? I’m bad at unnecessary melodrama.
All at once, it hit me ascending to upper mattress form was no longer in the cards. I had to find a way to sleep and execute it in such a way that elevation was not a prerequisite.
That’s when it hit me. My mattress had a pad on it; lightweight, adjustable, mildly keeps your body from sensing any notion of the ground below. It was the M&M’s Minis of bedding.
Just like that, the solution was obvious. In my best “Ro
yal Rumble” fashion, I pried the pad off of the mattress and flopped it on the floor, then adhered myself to the pad like a python set to sneak on every Disney animal character ever. This, in all it’s definitive prowess, was the birth of floorbed.
It may not have made sense at the time, but floorbed added convenience to my life like you can’t imagine. It was comfy enough to ease me into slumber but firm enough that it made my back crane to the point where I had to get up on time to mitigate an onslaught of paralysis. I moved my computer to the raised bed and worked on it while standing on a daily basis, which realized every “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fantasy I’d had since I was 9 years old, and I finally had a something that filled in the rest of my flooring and kept me from giving in to my yoga impulses. What turned into working hard in an effort to be lazy became the periodical rest phenomenon.
Floorbed remained for several months, until “the man” deemed it “a fire hazard” because it was “placed directly on top of two heating vents.” Balderdash if you ask me, but I didn’t see the need to rattle too many cages.
Every now and then, when I’m feeling adventurous, floorbed makes a cameo for a night, maybe two, just to remind me of those bygone pleasures. But as of late it makes itself known much more frequently, because one day it’ll be gone, replaced by a queen-size mainstream sleep platform with blankets I’ll never get to use and a nightstand worth more than my car payment.
It’s no fun, but I’ll do it for love. Until then, I’ll do floorbed. For me.
– Steve Schwartzman is a senior finishing a degree in communication studies. With eight years of column writing and improvisational comedy under his belt, he lives to make you laugh. Send thoughts to steve.schwartzman@aggiemail.usu.edu