Cozy

Whenever the word “cozy” comes up — whether in aspirations, or pastimes, descriptions and fashions — so lately there’s been a surge of nausea to follow.

It’s not that the coziness itself is bad, but maybe after a few years passing one peels the veneer back to find the guts to the word: Stagnation. Cozy things are stagnating things, or the gateway toward.

One may certainly conjure up the fire-side cabin as a coze-seeker paradise, but one may also render it as a burial site. A place where you go to die.

This is a troubling way to look at things because Cozy is quite in vogue: cozy is how a lot of living wants to go. But the nausea only grows once you begin to see it as stagnation.

There is no warm hugs or blankets to latch: there is only suffocation and impending squabbles, alcohol to follow in an attempt to shut away the side of the mind which so vaguely reminds you how it is, in fact, Stagnation. A vague awareness, but with enough Cozy devices employed maybe it’ll stave a bit.

But, alas, so this condition comes, explicitly domineering: Cozy flashes a sign which flickers a “Beware” between its neons, and heightens its grip when one is thrown into its prison.

See, with this deadened perspective, one could see “Cozy” purely as Marketing Hooks — a “cozy” occasion usually requires Some Product, even a blanket. To be drowning in Products and Warmness and none the wiser: the boiled frog but sporting a sweater.

Cozy shows itself as baggage, too. A parasitical invitation to leech and accumulate another 40 years before one understands it’s been feasting on dreams, or on the far-gone serenity of an empty backyard.

This is why it is best to have an empty house, and an empty bookshelf, with an empty camera reel, and a hardened mattress — on the floor, if so bold — as these things are not Stagnation, but Maintenance, and that’s plenty of difference for the Tasks of one’s day to take reigns.

It’s really troubling though, whenever one does come across those aspiring for a Cozy day: even scented candles bring a despair hard to name, if they’re transport-y enough to some palmy occasions long forgotten and revived uncouthly as ever.

Cozy is the seance best left silent.