Beautiful Birthday Fantasy

This post is part of a series of tongue-in-cheek streams of consciousness inspired by the holidays.

After yesterday’s horrific upload, let’s unwind with something a bit less serious for today, shall we?

I think most little girls grow up with a “dream house” in mind. Personally, I never gave the idea much thought until I learned about Brian Wilson’s house from when he was making SMiLE. You hear about the piano in the sandbox, the Arab tent in the living room and the planned slide going from an upper level into the bed and you can’t not think “damn…I’d love it if that were my house!”

So I started thinking of some ideas.

I really want to just have a room where the whole floor is white sand, the walls and ceiling are black with either UV or white (or both!) dots painted as though to resemble stars. On the ceiling, near but slightly off-center, I’d like to draw the Earth, maybe with some UV spots on there too, so as to look like the major metropolitan centers at night, when all their artificial lamps come on. In this way, you’d feel as though you were on the surface of the moon, looking at her center of gravity. The moon has to be the coolest place in the solar system at night, and perhaps unique among the universe, in that it gets to enjoy the natural constellations of the heavens as well as the false constellations of humanity. I can’t say what the others would be, but Egypt’s Nile River is certainly a snake–perhaps even a Chnoubis.

Another idea I had was like a “time room” to go with the “space room.” It’d be circular, and with a collection of intricate clocks all over the walls and then on the ground is a giant clock-face painted on with real working clock hands going across it! On the minute hand would be mounted a giant couch, the second could maybe have removable vacuum, waxing or mop accessories. The hour hand could have a stereo mounted on it or something, I guess. On the ceiling I would pay someone far more talented than I to do a Renaissance-style fresco, with the center being a yin yang symbol and emanating from it a bunch of overlapping historical figures, with those who lived earlier in time being closer to the center and then contemporary people around the edges.

Then I’d like to decorate an entire room in the same way I decorated the desk which forms this blog’s “cover image” on the home page. The floor could maybe be a bunch of legos under a plate of glass, as though you’re standing over a city in action. The bases of skyscrapers would reach the glass, and in between them would be “trenches” of streets with cars and people about. The walls would be littered with transparent dice skies and domino buildings. The ceiling could be a bunch of marbles and psychedelic-looking bouncy balls behind glass.

And maybe another room could be a series of funhouse mirrors on the walls, a 2001 Odyssey esque disco floor, and layer or two of quarters under a plane of glass for the ceiling. All around the sides of the room would be lamps with different colored bulbs. So it’d just be a series of wild rainbow reflections going everywhere and you’d feel like you were inside God itself.

I’d like to have a projection room, because if I was obscenely wealthy enough to live in a place like this you know I’d be collecting every movie I could get my hands on, from vintage Hitchcock to Italian obscurity to sleazy garbage, on 35mm film (or at least 16 for those that were shot on that format). This would be shaped like a real movie theater, with an ascending slope towards the projector, and along the walls would be statues of naked women (and men, I guess) like the Korova milk bar in A Clockwork Orange. I guess some words could be written on the walls in white too, but they’d be like arcane Gnostic sayings from the Gospels of Thomas and Philip. Stuff that most people might not even know is associated with Jesus.

Since we’re going all-in, I’d like an indoor sauna and pool room. The walls would be clear windows into an encompassing freezer where ice sculptures of all nature’s most beautiful animals are kept.

Finally, to end on lucky #7, I would love to have a great library where the ceiling is a giant glass plane. Every row of books would end in a giant lava lamp, each with different colored bottles and wax. You’d use them as directions “oh that book is down there, in the aisle between the green and blue lamps!” The floor would be yet another pane of glass, underneath which is a great swirl of colored sand laid out in an elaborate (but purely abstract) pattern.

Yes, it’s all impossible…but a girl can dream. Of course, those were my fantasies when I was in college. Now that I’ve seen the magnificent interior decorating present in Femina Ridens, Scacco alla Regina and La Matriarca, I’d probably just copy them. Give me a living room like Margaret’s a mirrored bedroom like Mimi’s and a multi-room BDSM dungeon like Sayer’s, please!