Fortunately, It's Just Something Else

When I was writing on this blog every single day for, um, for a very long time, it was inconceivable that there would come a time when I would write perhaps once a month.  Now that this time has arrived, it is inconceivable to me, now, that there was a time-- a very long time-- in my life where I wrote on this blog every single day.

Life; you're a real croquet mallet to the taint, aren't you?

I've been getting a lot of croquet mallets to the taint lately which, of course, doesn't make me special or martyred, it just makes me like everyone else.  I got rejected from a prospective job, my car that I bought three weeks ago started bucking like a horse and needed a repair that, if it hadn't been covered under warranty, would have cost $4,000-$5,000 to fix.  My dog died.  Work sucks.  And I haven't slept in approximately two years.  Yes, I know the twins are only 8 months old, but I count the time my wife was pregnant and thrashed around in bed in discomfort night after night, keeping me awake, and tack on another year of anxiety-ridden nightmares and evenings spent staring at the ceiling fan.

I tell people that I haven't slept since 1984, which was the year I finally understood that my mommy and daddy weren't going to live forever.  They say there's truth in every joke, and, if you look at pictures of me at around that age, there are black rings under my youthful, sparkly little eyes.

I'm emotionally drained and physically exhausted.  The heat around here has barely let up in two months and I struggle to keep my eyes open during the day-- they're all dried out from the excessive dependence on decades old window air conditioning units that struggle and wheeze like a COPD patient huffing and puffing to walk ten feet.  I need oxygen.  I need... something.

My dog needed something, too.  He needed something more than pills, something more than Glucosamine-rich food.  He needed something more than time and care and love.  He needed a miracle, and you can just ask the Catholic Church how short they are on those these days.  We kept him going longer than we should have, longer than was humane.  Did you know your vet can put your dog on the canine equivalent of hospice care?  Well, they can, if you're cowardly enough to go along with it.

We were.  For a couple long, sad weeks at any rate.

I knelt down on the floor of that tiny little room-- no bigger than our twins' nursery-- and I held him and stroked his thick, gray fur and I thought to myself, this is the most I've touched you in months.  And I felt sick.  I just kept rubbing his head and all the way down his back, as clumps of his fur came off in my hand and fluttered to the floor.  I was fine at reception.  I was fine talking to the vet tech.  I was fine when they brought him back in, the catheter inserted in his arm, like a condemned green mile prisoner deposited into the chamber.  When the vet came in and asked if I had any questions, my throat became thick and I shut my eyes and tears sprayed onto my glasses.

"How long will it take?" I asked.  I was surprised he understood the question, because what I heard was utterly unintelligible, but I guess a lot of people must ask that.

"Not very long at all, maybe a minute or two."

"Jesus," I said.

The Propofol went in first.  Goodnight, Finley.  His breathing had become so loud and harsh and raspy, cagey, throaty, labored, awful in the past year-- it was everywhere I walked.  When we would be upstairs and the baby monitor would be on downstairs, all it would pick up was his breathing-- like a lumberjack sawing through a stubborn oak.  I close my eyes and I can still hear it.  His head thunked on the blanket covering the floor in seconds and his tongue fell out lazily.  I stared at it, and I was shocked at how repulsed I was by the sight of it-- undignified, disorganized, vulgar.  I wanted to push it back into his mouth, like the doctor who put the coins over Lincoln's eyes, but I couldn't move.  The phenobarbital came next and fast-- the overdose.  The end.  Dr. Peters put the Littmann on Finley's chest and said,

"His heart's stopped."

His heart.  My heart.  I still could hear the relentless clatter of his breath.  Only I could hear it, I guess.

I'm so tired and run down these days I haven't had time to grieve or process or anything-- I suppose that's what this is.  This blog used to be the place I would come to and sort out life's idiocies and its beauties, where I could make fun of the world and myself, where I could come to identify with that part of me that still clung desperately to the notion that I was a writer in some way.  Now, I don't know what it is, or why it is.

I still can't get over how fast it happened.  He was fourteen-- eighty-eight in people years.  He was my first dog ever and, at 32, I come downstairs in the morning and I don't know what to do.  Make coffee, I suppose.  The English make tea-- the half-Israelis make coffee.  We have hairy arms and hot tempers and we drink coffee and we get on with it.  While taking a walk today with my father's sister who is visiting from Australia, I lost one of the baby's hats.  It's somewhere, on some street in our neighborhood somewhere-- some sidewalk.  I pushed them in the stroller while they slept and my 70-year-old aunt with her squeaky voice and her artsy glasses followed diligently a half-step behind us.  She casually mentioned that, in the early 70s, she fell in love with a cousin of hers and, when he was arranged-married off to someone else, she overdosed on pills to try to kill herself.  I wanted to stop pushing the stroller and turn to her and scream,

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURSELF?!  ALL DAY LONG I WORK WITH ASSHOLES LIKE THAT-- WHAT ARE YOU TELLING ME?"

But I just said, "uh-huh-- wow" and kept pushing the stroller along, petrified that, if I stopped and thought about it, it would become real.  Something to deal with, a thing to confront.  Fortunately, it's just something else to write about.

That's all.

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.

Bed, Perchance to Sleep...

I slept for shit last night.

I don't know why. My wife and I were at my mother and father's for dinner last night. The event commenced, as it is ordained so to do, at 5:30 and, by 7:20, we were both nodding off at the table.

"Jesus Christ," I hazily exclaimed after looking at my watch, "it's only 7:20?"

"So?" my mother dared me to proceed with further commentary.

"Well, come on," I slurred, "it's like a fucking opium den in here. Look at her," I said, gesturing lazily to my wife, "she can barely keep her head up."

My wife, almost cross-eyed, enthusiastically bobbed her head up and down, presumably in agreement.

I don't know what it is about my parent's house that is so soporific, but you can't be in there for longer than an hour and a half without your brain turning into a gray slushie. It's not like the conversation isn't lively-- it is-- last night we were conversing energetically about safety recalls of the pack-n-play my mother bought for my sister, my father was trying to harrass me into accepting a re-gift of a Continental Airlines credit-card holder ("The Israeli ambassador gave it to me! It's Italian leather, mummy-- beautiful!") while my eldest sister was giving my wife meticulous directions to the gynecologist's office in New Jersey. I mean, it's a pretty festive fucking environment.

I ended up not accepting the credit-card holder, regardless of its alleged quality and provenance. "How many credit cards do you think I have, for God's sake?" I asked. This thing was made for big boys. It even had a slot for a passport, with a piece of paper in it made to look like a passport, and a long, vertical slot for an airline ticket, with a fake airline ticket inside for "HAPPY AIRLINE." Can you just picture the flight attendants on Happy Airline?

My father is always trying to give me shit I don't want-- coupons to Ruby Tuesday ("Take your wife out for dinner, for God's sake-- it's beautiful!"), supermarket coupons, "Sveetie-- you won' believe this-- 2 liter bottles of Pepsi Diet for 89 cents each! I mean, fuck!") or random food products they have lying around the house that they can't wait to get rid of ("Mummy-- you like sunflower seeds, right?") but it's usually fruit.

Yesterday, we managed to escape with only half a watermelon, which we had to carry home in a bag as we walked to their house. It's a pleasant enough walk, though when encumbered with half a watermelon, it's decidedly less so. I don't know how serial killers or mafioso walk around with severed heads in bowling ball bags all the time.

I guess we should have gone to sleep immediately after arriving home from their house, but we stayed up for another three hours and while this should have only increased my thirst for sleep, I instead got totally wired. As I lay in bed, my wife instantly asleep after a back rub, my mind wandered to the following topics:

Everything I did wrong this weekend including, but not limited to,

# hitting my head a total of four (4) times

# breaking a shelf my father-in-law hand-made for us five years ago

# breaking a large lamp bulb in the kitchen (by hitting my head on it-- #2 out of 4)

* being unprepared for work today

* all the bills that have been paid/have to be paid

* obsessing about our mortgage and its seeming unendingness

* ditto on school loans

* the many ways someone could easily break into our house

* the fact that I sleep naked in the summer and how stupid I would look confronting a burglar in such aforementioned nudity and how my only shot at not getting killed would be that the burglar would probably laugh so hard at my emaciated form that he might drop his gun.

* thinking about death

* thinking about Michael Jackson's death

* considering a myriad of snappy combacks I'd love to say to people, especially my boss

* obsessing about why I can't fall asleep

I must have fallen asleep for at least a little bit, because I know I had a dream about my father promising to buy my a vintage Volkswagen Beetle (something he already did for me when I was fourteen-- and I ended up selling it at age 15-and-a-half because I was too scared to drive it due to its lack of safety features, like, um, shoulder belts). The dream, of course, didn't go well, and ended with me yelling at him because he didn't understand that Volkswagen stopped making the original Beetle in the year 1979 and that I was only interested in Beetles from 1962-1967, but that I wanted to test-drive "a later model just to be sure."

"You mean like 1995 or 1996?"

"NO, GODDAMNIT! THEY WEREN'T MAKING THEM THAT LATE!"

"You mean like 1991 or 1992?"

"AAAAAAAAH! NO! WHAT THE FUCK! I MEAN, LIKE, 1968 to 1971! JESUS!"

"Oh. So, like 1989 or something."

My poor father. We are destined to be unable to communicate, even in my dreams. My very brief, unsatisfied, unkind, unrequited dreams. Oh well. There's always tonight. Maybe, instead of our marital bed, I can try sleeping at my parent's dining room table. It's a good thing I don't see a therapist anymore, or he might call that a disturbing bit of regression.