meditations on a sleepless morn, part IV

continued from part I, wherein andrew compares not sleeping to digestion, part II, wherein andrew recites shampoo instructions and says strange things about death scenes, and part III, wherein andrew reviews the film phoebe's wonderland

i fish for my alarm clock. it's wedged between the bed and the wall, and i have to be careful not to pull too hard or the finicky plug will fall from the socket and i will lose the time. 

the red digits read five fifty-seven. 

if i fall asleep now, i'll have nearly three hours before i have to wake up for church, three hours before brendan arrives, knocking mercilessly at my door. i set the clock on my bed and listen to the wind on my windows. i try to tease out the sounds, to match them with their visual counterparts. 

the sounds get the best of me and i abandon the pursuit of sleep and all its nonsensical histrionics. i roll my naked body out of the warm bed and scamper quietly to the living room where i fetch my laptop. i start composing this post in my brain even as i pad back to my room. i wonder whether i'll mention queequeg's teeth or the ridiculous image of me creeping past my roommate's door, a covert mission made absurd by my lack of appropriate creeping attire. 

i wonder, now typing, whether that's too much, whether i should say that. i wonder who will read it and what they will think. i wonder where one draws the line between propriety and personal revelation, between art and confession. i think of anne sexton and robert lowell and the confessional poets, even john donne, the pastor-poet, all saying things straight, not shying from talk of the body or the everyday.

i think of my friend who, as an adult, pooped her pants and then, with a smile and an uncontrollable laugh, proceeded to tell all the world. i think of my ex-girlfriend who penned a brilliant, socially conscious personal essay on race that she never published because it was tangentially about her cousin.

i stop writing, my finger poised over the delete key. will it somehow hurt my reputation or disgust my friends to say that i am naked now, to construct no barrier between the truth and the page? will it reveal too much to nakedly confess that in september of 2010 my every thought spiraled back in a cloud of longing and sadness to my ex-girlfriend but that now, more than a year after we began a slow descent into separation, i am finally happy and content in my single skin?

to be continued one last time . . .

if i were to review this film: phoebe's wonderland; or meditations on a sleepless morn, part III

continued from part I, wherein andrew compares not sleeping to digestion, and part II, wherein andrew recites shampoo instructions and says strange things about death scenes

for most of us, sleeping is a daily ritual that we don't bother thinking much about. we only give it attention when we're having difficulty doing what should come naturally, and then we go to absurd lengths to hasten its onset. for example, i sometimes lie in bed obsessing over the repetition of bizarre behaviors or imposing strange rules upon myself, all in a self-consciously irrational attempt to jump-start the REM sleep cycle.

but what about those people for whom such absurdities are an everyday reality? what about people for whom my dreaded hours on the border of that illusive sleep continent are a never-ending part of life, even in the daylight? 

i've had friends with mildish cases of obsessive compulsive disorder, and though i've tried to be sympathetic, it's hard to understand their inability to distance themselves from certain repetitive behaviors, and harder still to imagine how troubling those inabilities might feel to the people with the disorder. it's much easier to laugh. and so in a twisted way, i'm thankful for not sleeping, for getting a glimpse at how it might feel to contend with the arbitrary force of repetition. 

and i'm thankful for the film phoebe's wonderland, which takes a young girl with tourette's syndrome (a condition that's related to OCD but seems rather more serious) as its protagonist. the film has its issues--some of the non-tourette's characters seem over the top and the film gets off to a slowish start--but the actress's portrayal of a girl with tourette's and the family's complicated response to her condition are affecting and real.

to be continued . . .

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

rating: 11/17

meditations on a sleepless morn, part II

continued from part I, wherein andrew compares not sleeping to digestion 

rinse lather repeat.

this is the magic formula i find myself chanting at daybreak. i'm saying the words earnestly, as if they mean something, as if there is a power to their rhythm. i speak them into my pillow, mouthing the words with silent urgency, believing hopelessly that when said in succession, they possess certain hitherto unknown sleep-inducing properties.

rinse lather repeat, i say, rinse lather repeat.

these words are my deathbed confession. no, they are my whispered communique in that first scene where friends and family cup their hands to my mouth and lean in to drink the honeycomb words of a dying old man, but from our sticky seats in the cineplex, we can see that there is more to those empty puffs than epilogue and benediction. we can see the beads of sweat on the old man's brow, the sudden dilation of the eye. and we know that a clue has been lost, that the dying man intends to convey some truth to break the spell of a tragedy that is now sure to continue. we know that people may die and that the protagonist will require at least an hour to sort things out and save the world. 

don't you think one of us should have pity and tell the protagonist? we could slip into that secret room with the film canisters and projectors and spare him the agony of lost love ones, lost time, and lost sleep. the old man says, rinse lather repeat, we'd tell him, rinse lather repeat.

but god is in the theater. perhaps he wrote the script. and so i'm praying that he knows the words, that he can take my cosmetic cosmology, my nonsense phraseology, and spin the story just right. he can transform my desperate compunction to say these words into a sort of worship. and then, in his great mercy, he can bring down the curtain and i can get some sleep.

rinse lather repeat, and make it soon, lord jesus.

to be continued . . .

meditations on a sleepless morn, part I

it's four fifty in the morning and i'm thinking about what television show episodes might work well to read through in a group of friends and amateur thespians--deadwood, full house, the a-team, seinfeld, the care bears, south park? i'm thinking about life's riddle of boy-meeting-girl and the whirligig revolving doors of relationships that i see around me. i'm thinking about queequeg and the curious act of filing one's teeth to sharp, needle-like points.*

it's five o'clock and i'm wishing i were asleep, trying to sleep, desperately attempting to convince my brain to turn off the lights and shut-in for the night. it's five past five, and my mind seizes on some strange dream-logic for finding sleep: if i breathe slower, sleep will come. if i breathe slower but move this hand from my thigh to beneath my head, where it's not so hot, not so buried in covers, sleep will come. but only if i roll over first. if i imagine myself gently patting the head of a duck seven times, sighing peaceably, and then repeat the scene in my head ad infinitum, sleep will come.

i think then about the word repeat, an inelegant slamming of syllables that seems to carry the weight of its meaning in the prefix. there's no poetry to the word, no reason to fashion an ode after the movement from re to peat. my attention to this word is as meaningless and arbitrary and useless as the ritual of the duck. 

but the word gets caught in my craw, which i imagine as my mouth, as a great gaping space of teeth and tongue and red tissue where ideas bang about, where the trick is to bite down hard at just the right moment and to stop the idea, to sever its head from its body and to snap its larynx so that it can't persist in its cruel quacking hum. the trick is to kill it dead. but the word is caught in my craw, not my mouth, and i remember that one's craw is one's stomach and that the stomach is a squirrelly nest of intestines, which, if you unravel and lay out upon the carpet and linoleum of your home, may stretch from your bed to the refrigerator and back again, just enough distance to snag a late-night snack, a pre-dawn beer, but in the body that distance is all snug up on itself, all bunched together so that what takes a moment to walk can take a lifetime to digest--a lifetime of strange body chemicals and duodenal juice, a lifetime of night.

the word, the idea behind the word, is caught there, and i can't get it out. i need an antacid or a surgeon. i need an exorcist. 

i try to think of a bible verse with the word repeat, a holy phrase that i could say as a sort of bedtime mass, a way to force god's merciful hand through the steady repetition of repetition itself. if i say the right words at the right time, i think, i will receive grace. i cannot believe otherwise. sleep has become for me a works-based faith.




to be continued...

xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

*queequeg is the harpooner who ishmael sleeps with in the opening chapters of herman melville's moby-dick. 

if i were discussing this film: the american

do you sometimes have trouble sleeping? do you wish the travel channel had more programs with no talking and more sex with prostitutes? do you have a soft spot for facile love stories and senseless plots? 

if yes, i highly recommend the film the american. 

i fought the urge to sleep all movie long because i really believed it was headed somewhere. big mistake. i forgot about the men who stare at goats and leatherheads. i figured, this is george clooney. he only appears in good flicks. 

one of the marks of an excellent film is the ability to get in viewers' heads, to make them question their own lives and beliefs and actions. a truly great film will challenge your view of the world and the self. and i suppose i have to give some credit here--

watching the american made me question my own qualities as a friend. how could i inflict this film on anyone i cared about? or even worse, given that the primary purpose of this film was clearly to serve as a tonic for insomnia, how could i behave as i did halfway through the film when i noticed my friends' eye lids droop, when i noticed him finding the great blessing of sleep? indeed, how selfish of me to deprive him of that nap, to nudge him, even gently, awake. misery loves company.

but there are some cool shots of street-lamp-lit italian mountain villas. and the prostitute-love interest is attractive and naked, if you like that kind of thing in your films. there's also an inexplicable friendship between the ever-silent clooney and a platitude-pronouncing, philandering priest, so again, if you're into that kind of thing, enjoy!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

rating: 6/17

did anyone on the web reading this like the american? apparently some critics did; it has a bloated rating of 65% on rotten tomatoes.

this is a litle tale about sleeping

once, long ago, a whirling bit of cosmic dust, an almighty deity, or some cosmic accident resulted in this thing we know as humanity. whatever our origin, us bipedal primates were designed to spend half of our lives sleeping.


indeed, the bed is the great equalizer; even honeymooners and dudes on death row must sleep.


finding this sleeping business a bit tedious (and an utter waste of time), beth, angie, and i planned our escape. we traveled deep into the sun soaked land of mexico.


once we reached the coastal village of yelapa, we sidestepped the bed bugs for an hour or so by joining a candle-lit dance party. the locals were a peculiar blend of hippee, tourist, and native, but the dj's fondness for cheesy eighties music made us retreat to our jungle bungalow.


and it was there that we succumbed to that inevitable sign of human weakness--we slept.


like any holy grail quest, our search was in most ways a failure. despite its two dollar margaritas, roaring iguanas, and tropical beach, yelapa could offer us no antidote to the night. still, our sleep was far from boring. as you may or may not have noticed, these beds are covered in netting AND, better yet, they hang: we were safe from all those nasty jungle critters while hanging suspended in mid-air. it was as if the bed itself was a physical representation of our sleep state; that night we hovered happily in our dreams. how can sleep get cooler than that?

(it can't.)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. what if we're stuck in seattle? should we avoid the boredom of sleep and advocate our friends and roommates to do the same?

2. speaking of roommates, what is one to do if his (or her) roommate serves as a roadblock for this pursuit of waking life? for example, let's say that at 9pm someone intends to delay the call of sleep by watching a hit tv show (e.g., 24) with his girlfriend, but that his roommate says, "no, i have to work early in the morning; i'm going to bed now, and the tv is too loud." what should one do?

3. okay, okay. so assuming that one does the polite thing and lets his or her roommate drift safely to sleep, what if the roommate also says "yep, i've decided that i need more sleep, i'm gonna start going to bed about this time every night. maybe you could use the tv friday nights..." what now? sure, mark needs his sleep, but what about my right to occasionally watch a movie on my big screen tv?

(i was going to ask a sex question related to hanging beds, but then i remembered that i was annoyed about our small house, so alas, i asked no sex question. now it's too late.)