Ill get home from work and enter a dizzy stage of tired. It triggers on walking in and setting everything down. The kids run to their rooms after school and settle in. They will call who gets first dibs on the bathroom on the ride back and camp there for a solid 40 minutes. I'm then on the couch digging my feet into the crack between couch cushions and covering myself in a knitted afghan.
This sort of tired does not feel earned like after a day's honest work or a hard hike. Instead its a burst drain, an ice jam letting go in February sun and crashing everything onto the patio furniture below. Anxiety leaving the body where one can be most true? My parents had a tchotchke hanging above the fridge that read...
Home Sweet Home: Where You Can Scratch Where It Itches
Home, where it is ok to cry and kick your dog and scrape the last layers of the peanut butter jar because it was a day. A series of days.
I type often about sleep and dreams. My dreams are furtive and cyclical anchored in the possible impossible. My life if I never moved out of central New York. A day in the life as a journalist. A restaurateur. Watching a new bridge over the Cuyahoga River open. They are rarely titillating but that is because I undress everyone I encounter, just some more than others.
A recent dream had me craft blocks of text into infinite work email memos. This is a deviation of a repeating one from my previous job, jockeying in a warehouse, where boxes fell and nested into one another. A waterwall of interlocking cardboard like my son's frozen Minecraft waterfalls. In the first moments of awakening the dream remains vibrant but it fades away at an impossible speed. Forget faster than light drives. Go for faster than dream decay drives. Trying to unravel cooked spaghetti with a school lunch room spork would be easier.
Sometimes these naps extend into the early evening. Two hours and my wife has gotten home and already lived a full second life while I awaken and think I should note that and put in on the blog.
