More Snore

So, I was all prepped and primed to write another super-offensive post for this morning, centering around funny, hypothetical, as-yet-nonexistent “… Of the Month Club” offerings, (“Autopsy Pic of the Month”—- that kind of thing) but, after I lost two whole followers yesterday (like—where the fuck did you go? Indochina?) I figured maybe I ought to hold off on the nastiness for at least a day.

N’yah mean?

Instead, I thought maybe I’d write a little bit about sleep. It’s hard to get into trouble with your readers by writing about sleep. Right?

I haven’t been sleeping well at all recently—- maybe for the past two weeks or so. I really noticed it yesterday as I was shaving. Because I shave with my glasses off, I have to shave with my face practically pressed up against the mirror to actually see what the fuck I’m doing. I guess if I ever started cutting I would have to do it with my glasses on or I’d probably cut my arm off at the shoulder.

Anyway, I was standing there in the bathroom, my delicate ribs clearly visible through the tissue-paper thin layer of skin, craning my neck so I could be sure every half-Israeli hair would be suitably hacked off in short order, and I noticed that my eyes were very, very red. I guess that, coupled with the rapid descent in the genial nature of my personality, was what prompted a coworker to ask if I’d “started drinking yet.”

“No,” I said, “when I do, you’ll know it. I’ll start putting children in headlocks and I’ll cry a lot more. In public.”

That shockingly red spread of crinkly spiderwebs inside my ocular stuffs kind of took me aback. I don’t ordinarily manifest physical symptoms. I rarely exhibit side-effects of medication (except for that one time I got thrush on my tongue from an overzealous antibiotic prescription. For days my tongue looked like the shag carpeting on the set of “That ‘70s Show.”) and coffee/caffeine has absolutely no effect on me. I can drink 20 ounces of coffee in the morning and be a pathetic, lazy shitneck for hours on end, and I can drink a cup an hour before bed and fall asleep with no problem whatsoever.

Well, until recently.

For years, I’ve fallen asleep with absolutely no problem whatsoever. And that’s kind of a big fucking deal for someone with chronic anxiety and hypochondria to say. I mean, if I tried, I could keep myself awake for days on end thinking about all the ways I could die. And, when I was a little boy, I did just that.

So maybe I got a lot of that out of my system. There’s residuals still there, of course. Always residuals.

For the past couple weeks, though, my wife will conk out effortlessly, or so it seems, and I will lie there, staring up at the ceiling fan, or the seams in the ceiling wallpaper (yes, our bedroom ceiling is covered in white wallpaper. And it kind of kills me.) and I flip over and I lie on my side, shoving a hand in between two pillows, or underneath both pillows, or outstretched over the headboard.

Lying on my stomach isn’t helpful, because, unlike most bloggers, I’m a guy and, hence, my genitals are on the outside. Life’s no fun for a penis when it gets schmushed against a mattress. I know, it sounds kind of fun, but it isn’t.

I obsess, horizontally, in the dark. It’s just something that I do, but I’ve usually satisfied my subconscious by obsessing during business hours, and/or immediately thereafter. Obsessing on my blog is helpful, but, apparently, it just isn’t enough. I now find it necessary to obsess in bed. And that’s probably not healthy. Frank Lloyd Wright said that “bedrooms are for sleeping,” and he used that as a justification, I suppose, for building really small bedrooms. I mean, sure, you’re not supposed to be doing calisthenics in there, and I’m no athlete, sexual or otherwise, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to follow Wright’s maxim: sleep in your bedroom, asshole.

I worry in my bedroom. I obsess in my bedroom. I think.

What about? Oh, I don’t know. I think about the future. The present. The past. That’s the most useless, and, consequently, my favorite ruminatory endeavor. I replay idiotic things I said or did during the course of the day, I self-flagellate, I chastise, I shake my head at myself in disbelief sometimes. I get angry. I laugh to myself—sometimes out loud. I listen for the dogs shitting or clicking on the hardwood or whining or breathing. I watch my wife sleep. Sometimes she snores, sometimes she doesn’t.

I always do—when I sleep, that is.