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Get Some Sleep Already

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Seven mornings out of seven, I wake up pleading with myself to allow me to get more sleep. My second conscious thought every morning is, “I did not get enough sleep,” and I quickly review to see what time my last memory was, look at my phone to see what time it currently is, and then commence juggling my day’s schedule in my head to allow for another 15 minutes or another hour or another night of sleep.

I am not anyone’s employee, and have not been for over four years. So why am I pleading for more sleep? With whom? I could roll back over and rest until the promised arrival of the mythical Enough Sleep, a god or goddess who will declare me rested for all time and in no more need of sleep, and no one would notice my absence or care. I am no longer on anyone’s clock. I no longer need to call anyone to “take my shift.” I am retired/disabled.

After I have a little coffee, I quickly scan the news; within 10 minutes I am sure that I have once again slept too late, for too long, and I can not possibly get everything I had planned yesterday for today accomplished. Thus, my day starts out screwed, in two ways, every day. The eight-ball may be very quiet when it arrives every morning, but upon walking through my door, I am trapped behind it.

The hecticness of one’s life, the hecticity, is something we carry like a badge of honor. Rush hour, experienced twice a day, is the fiercest example of this: an entire city population (around here, entire county) comprised of people who think that they are running behind and are facing immediate unemployment if it weren’t for all the other slow drivers competing for their deserved two yards of macadam. And all those other slow drivers hate you, too, for the same reason of their own immediate unemployment.

Once one is convinced that there is no getting around the fact of imminent screwdom, it becomes something we almost brag about to each other. How many people greet you with a hearty and sometimes sarcastic, “Working hard?” “No, I’m getting coffee.” I held a job for a year in which my major occupation became “looking busy.” An observer would have thought I was a courier or constantly mailing documents to the home office. That observer would have been wrong.

We measure the quality of our day by the number of achievements we have. Number of documents published versus quality of work, or the number of times this week we beat personal commuting records to and from the office, or numbers of reps at the gym, or, worse, for those dieting, number of days without “cheating,” which represents even more harsh ways to harshly self-judge.

We live in a culture of Other Peoples’ Success and thus exist in a competition with others for more successes than them and yet better ones. This is because, as Brené Brown, a pop sociologist, points out, we live in a “culture of scarcity. We wake up in the morning and we say, ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ And we hit the pillow saying, ‘I didn’t get enough done.’ We’re never thin enough, extraordinary enough or good enough—until we decide that we are. The opposite of ‘scarcity’ is not ‘abundance.’ It’s ‘enough.’ I’m enough.”

Obviously, from the sketch at the top, the culture of scarcity is deeply programmed in me, even though I am no longer a part of any race to any place. The need for hecticity, which always contains within it the desire to escape from it, is deep in me.

I’m enough. Not “I’m good enough.” I’m enough. How hard that is to say, and to mean it to be about me, myself, and not you. It is even harder to embrace. And for every one of those days when I catch a glimpse of almost believing it and I briefly live a little more easy inside myself, make sure you are not in my way on line for coffee the next day. I’m working hard. I’m setting new records.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 24 asks, “We all seem to insist on how busy, busy, busy we constantly are. Let’s put things in perspective: tell us about the craziest, busiest, most hectic day you’ve had in the past decade.”

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Message in a Bottle

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Everyone who writes has an imaginary friend.

There is an ideal reader in my imagination, a figure who finds even my shopping lists and notes in the margins of books interesting. I have not yet actually met anyone who fits this description, but I keep writing, just in case.

Rarely have I written something while in the presence of the person I was writing to. The only exceptions to this would be times I have sent a note or a text to the person sitting next to me, but these were done for one of two reasons: 1. We needed to be silent, or 2. I wanted to elicit an ironic smirk when we needed to be silent.

So everyone who writes has a figure, real or imagined, who is supposed to be the reader of the message. For me, this person has changed over time, and even changes from piece to piece.

In the 1990s, when I wrote for a weekly newspaper, I rarely learned which articles or columns were actually read.

I covered school sports, which has a couple of rules: Cram in the names of every participant on the field and even every benchsitter, without mentioning the bench. (Unless the bench was locally made and recently delivered, in which case it was a good idea to include the names of the lumberyard and the furniture maker along with a quote about its bench-y comfort from someone sitting on it.) When both schools are local, simultaneously downplay and up-play the final score. Describe good performances from both sides. Cram in a few more names: the coaches, the refs, some of those in attendance.

A compliment from a reader of one of those articles was a thank you from a parent purchasing an extra copy to send to the grandparents–if I ran into them at the grocery store while they were purchasing that extra copy.

I also had a humor column (guess its name) and I once wrote something controversial in it. Now, this was done out of an idiotic frustration that I felt from my perceived lack of feedback. “How do I know what people think?” I said to no one out loud, and so I put on my explorer costume and ventured forth without leaving my desk to find out. If I had said it out loud, my editor probably would have dissuaded me.

My column was on page 4, and on page 3 was a column written by an elderly man who had spent a lifetime in newspapers, local newspapers; his entire four-decade-long career had been spent in the same county we were covering. It is possible that he had written something about every single building in the county and more than a few open fields. Not one piece of mail had come into the newspaper office about my column, even when I had requested feedback from readers, but there was a letter every single week about the old man’s column. “He should retire already” or “May he never quit” were the only two themes, but one of these arrived every week!

(He passed away about 15 years ago and the newspaper, which I had by then left, continued to run his columns as a weekly “Best of …” tribute; I am certain the paper still received the “He should retire” and “May he never quit” letters every week.)

But I was the target of no such letters and I envied the old man his passionate readership. The one time that I wrote something controversial, controversy followed: Our music columnist used his weekly space to rebut my column and publicly declare that not only had he not ever read me but he was going to continue to not read me, which seemed a neat trick. He did not send a letter to the editor; instead he wasted his own column inches to disagree with me. I told him, in person, in my job as assistant editor, that we still needed his music review that week and we would run the complaint in the letters section, which needed a letter as we had received not even one that week. He insisted on using his space to not review music in that issue, though.

Times are different now, says everyone who has lived long enough to learn to talk, and this blog, which is almost a year old now, has readers who are also writers and who like to give feedback. “The Gad About Town” has a small readership, so far, but a feedback-y sort of readership, for which I am grateful. I do not need to generate controversy just to do so. I also do not need to cram in the names of a lumberyard and furniture store.

Everything we write is a message in a bottle, and I no longer attempt to steer the currents to shore for my messages.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 22 asks, “Many of us had imaginary friends as young children. If your imaginary friend grew up alongside you, what would his/her/its life be like today? (Didn’t have one? write about a non-imaginary friend you haven’t seen since childhood.)”

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(Im)mortality

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” —G.K. Chesterton, “The Flag of the World.”

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The suicide is committing, from his or her terrible and terrifying and terrified point of view, genocide. Humanity-cide.

Martin Amis, in his memoir, “Experience,” paraphrases that quote and then contrasts it with a more nuanced and empathetic passage from Nabokov’s “The Eye”:

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I saw now […] how conventional were my former ideas on presuicidal preoccupations; a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since, together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.

I am grateful that I am many years removed from any moments of despair in this life, but I remember that I was not going to leave a note because a note was an act of a living man and I was already not among the living. An impending suicide attempt tints every mundane act with an unholy glow, an outsider’s perspective that one briefly, ruefully, wishes one had had “in life.” The simplest acts also acquire sarcastic, rueful, air quotes: “This is the ‘last time’ I will have to fight with this stupid broken shoelace.” Any step in the dance of the living—eating a sandwich, say, or washing a fork—feels like a betrayal to the mission, which is a stifled soul-sickness and grants everything an omnipresent green calm.

It can last a split-second or it can last years, and a shorter period of time does not make it easier, and is just as exhausting perhaps; I pray that I am the only person in the world who has felt it, but I know that I am not. I would not be writing anything today if I was not many years removed from it. A writer, as Nabokov reminds us in “The Eye,” is hyper-alive. Maybe make that simply, alive.

The twinned quotations in “Experience” about the saddest reality (Amis has many twins in his work) come in a chapter about expanding love and family: a woman with whom he had an affair in the 1970s had a daughter but never told Amis and subsequently committed suicide when the daughter was two. He knew about his lover’s death but not the girl and finally met her when she was 18.

Their mutual discovery is that love is not a zero-sum game, in which a loss is always balanced by a gain, that love instead can only increase, well, that discovery is a hard-won insight, the sort that only comes from a deep, shared loss. (If a terrible loss leads to a worthwhile insight, doesn’t that imply all of life really is a sort of zero-sum game?—Pretend Editor.) Their families increased in size and complexity but not complications, and the missing woman is a part of it all.

Love can only increase. Unlike hate, which can be remedied and is somehow itself always a zero-sum proposition, once love is felt, it leaves a permanent mark on the landscape. Maybe it is the inner landscape.

All funerals are terrible, by definition, but some more so than others. A quarter-century ago, a co-worker of mine was shot and killed along with her mother by the father of her child, in front of the child. (It was an unobserved-by-CPS weekend custody handover. I hope people lost jobs over it.) A group of us went to the services and were greeted at the door by an older man who looked like he was allergic to suits; it looked like he had been consumed by this one all the way up to his neck and the suit was taking a rest before finishing him off. Two, twinned, coffins lay up front, closed from view, angled to fit in the small chapel.

I shook the man’s hand and he took my shoulder. His face was wet and unattended to by a handkerchief. Not knowing how to act or what to say to anyone, I solicitously asked who he was, assuming and hoping he was as distant as distant could be from the tragedy to ease my own sense of discomfort. “I am the father and the husband,” he replied with a “the” for each lost one and the beautiful expression of one who knew, not felt, knew that his dearest loves now loved him all the more completely from a different plane of existence.

I do not share that confidence, but I see its beauty.

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The above image from a Pinterest collection by Vanessa Longoria.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 20 asks, “At what age did you realize you were not immortal? How did you react to that discovery?”

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