This Is Not a Funny Post

(Photo from American Academy of Orofacial Pain)

My absolute biggest fear is cicadas. But my second biggest fear is of being wrongly convicted of a capital crime, spending 20 years locked up in prison and working my way through the appeals process before finally being executed at the hands of the government which I have worshipped, in spite of its utterly flawed and broken state, since I was 10. I'm feverishly scribbling this at 12:30 in the morning with an alarm clock on the nightstand rapidly ticking toward it's 6:00 a.m. call time, so when I say this is the sort of thing that can keep me up nights, I'm not exaggerating. (Quick confession. Though I wasn't making up the bit about being kept up nights, I was fabricating the alarm. It's 2011. I use my cell phone to get up. It doesn't tick in the same kind of impending doom way I needed to set the scene though.) I accept that this fear of mine is unlikely, but I won't say it's irrational. Since 1973, 130 people have been released from death row based on wrongful convictions. You could say that this is proof that the system works. You could also be realistic for a minute and admit that probably some innocent people have been executed in the name of justice.
     Enough of this soapbox though. Let's get back to important matters. Let's get back to ME. Since I was a little girl, no one has ever seen me sleep. My girlfriend who has slept next to me almost every night for the last 3 1/2 years has never seen me sleep. This isn't to say I have not slept in the company of others. I've shared beds with my best guy friends in State College, Pa; Savannah, GA; Columbus, OH; and Gatlinburg, TN. I've crashed living room floors with Tim and Susan. But I'm careful, and I'm a light sleeper. The second my bed or living room floor mate turns over or stretches or yawns or unconsciously scratches his or her stomach, I'm up. I open my eyes, I turn over too, or I say, "Hey there." I do whatever it takes to send the message, hey you, no funny business. No sticking my hand in warm water or writing the word "idiot" on my forehead with a permanent marker or whatever it is that awake people do to asleep people when they're not vigilant. I'm onto you, mother-fucker. Seriously, what is it that people do? Someone tell me so maybe I can conquer this fear.
     For whatever reason, this is something I've been thinking a lot about today. I don't know why, but it suddenly dawned on me that, unless I meet some sort of Wile E. Coyote cartoon demise or I'm shot in the head because I flip the wrong person the bird for cutting me off on the highway, I'm not going to escape this life without someone seeing me sleep. Death, when it's drawn out, like it will be for most of us (come on asteroid the size of Texas), is not pretty. It's days, if not weeks or months, in hospital beds with doctors and nurses coming to poke at you at all hours. Loved ones sitting by your side, involuntarily measuring the time between your breaths.
     If you're on death row, people waiting for you to die is your whole life, not just the last few sick days. It's years, maybe even decades, of people watching and waiting for you to take your last breath. No, literally, in the end there are people in a gallery behind a pane of glass, eager and waiting to see you fall into permanent sleep, so that maybe, finally, they can rest. How does this not freak anyone else out?
     Whatever the cause of my inevitable death, whether it's cancer or conviction, at some point I'm either going to have to get over my fear of people watching me sleep or else come to terms with dying of exhaustion.   

I'm Always Tired, and You Should Be Too

I haven't consistently slept well since autumn 1980. I was a fetus, and for two blessed months, life was good.
     According to Science Daily and, you know, scientists, after about 7 months in the womb, fetuses spend most of their time sleeping. For me, this is easy enough to understand for two reasons. One, if I don't have something mentally (say an intense political debate with a libertarian) or physically (say running away from a cicada) stimulating happening to me for 45 consecutive seconds, I get bored. As a fetus, once you've counted all the ceiling tiles 1000 or so times and mastered every yoga position that the space your stuck in allows, you're bound to want to escape to dreamland. Two, it would take me 7 months to adapt to and block out the ceaseless cacophony of my mother's beating heart, growling stomach, and echoing external conversations ringing in my ears. (Yes, I know fetuses can't hear right off the bat, but this is not a science article.) If you think about it, the stream of noise that fetuses are subjected to for weeks on end probably violate some of the anti-torture regulations of the Geneva Conventions. Boredom or no, it would take me 7 months to get to a place where I could sleep, but once I could fall asleep, I think I'd want to go ahead and ride it out.
     After birth (not to be confused with afterbirth) I found no shortage of reasons not to fall asleep, not to stay asleep, and to wake up 15 minutes before the alarm went off every single time. The same explanation can be given for all three scenarios. Unlike so many of my fellow humans, my sleeping brain never evolved beyond the Pleistocene. As far as I'm concerned, a saber-toothed cat could come barging into my den at any moment, and I'd damn-well better be prepared. As far as my prehistoric brain knows, every sound, the flushing of a toilet, a 3:00 a.m. clap of thunder, an alarm clock sounding, could mean death. Constant vigilance is required.
     In addition to these perfectly logical, completely involuntary reasons not to sleep well, other more far-fetched yet doubly terrifying reasons were given to me by sadistic film makers and trusted teachers. My 8th grade science teacher, Mr. Bruns (who always had chalk on his crotch) showed us the 1983 made-for-tv classic, The Day After. I've mentioned this before. The film is about life in Kansas City, Missouri in the days and weeks following a nuclear holocaust. If the image of Steve Guttenberg's face rotting off due to radiation exposure hadn't been enough to keep me up nights, Mr. Bruns soothing words, "The crazy thing about this movie is that this could really happen," were. Forget the fact that I'd seen the Berlin Wall come down with my own eyes five years earlier, and the USSR had dissolved 3 years prior. The Cold War raged on and Russia still had nukes pointed right at my bedroom, and I knew it.  To make matters worse, I grew up a few miles south of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and every time a cargo plane flew over, which was several times nightly, the words that ran through my head were, "Oh my God. This is it."
     If fear of prehistoric feline attack or the end of the world aren't enough to keep you up nights, how about the possible death of a loved one? I don't know how old I was when I figured out that "everyone you know, someday, will die," but once I grasped this concept, it stuck with me.
     

For several years before I was born, my parents owned an Australian Terrier named Barney. By the time I was born, he was in his prime. By the time I was 4, I realized he, my best friend, would die. By the time I was 9, I would stay awake nights just to watch him breathe. I'm not sure what I would have done had the poor deaf, blind, and hairless 15-year-old mass of perfection stopped breathing, but, at the very least, I was more than prepared to collapse into heap of sobbing hysterics when the inevitable happened. I do this with humans too. I was lying in bed, trying to get a couple hours of sleep before returning to Hospice when I got the call that my grandfather had died. I hadn't actually been asleep, of course, because of the nagging fear that an unexpected and jarring predator in the form of my phone's ringtone could sound at any minute. Still, when the sound came, I was startled. My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest. Then, when my mother's words finally made sense, I wished it would.

     Who could sleep knowing that you're likely to wake up to feline attack, nuclear holocaust, or the death of a loved one? Doesn't 90 or so years of complete and utter exhaustion seem like a small price to pay to prevent so much pain? Pour yourself a cup of coffe and quit your whining.  

      

The Curious Case of Thanks, Now I Wish I was Dead

There are a lot of things that serve to remind us that there is never enough time. New Year's Eve; birthdays; the death of a pet, grandparent, fictional character in a movie based on a short story written by someone who is also dead, etc.

"Carrie, did your mother tell you that Polly died?" Polly was the cat that my mother and I rescued from the clutches of an obese, smokey smelling woman at the local pet store. The 6-week-old kitten kept scurrying away from the woman and the woman kept picking her back up and placing her on the side of the cage, apparently amused at Polly's iron grip, the direct result of what must have been Polly's desire not to plummet 5 feet to what surely seemed like certain death. My mother and I bought the kitten and took it home to my grandparents' house, explaining that it would be good for them to have a pet, which it was, for eleven years, right up until the moment the vet on the other end of the phone explained to my grandmother and her sister (who lives with her) that Polly's red and white blood cells were low and that it might be something treatable or it might be cancer, but that they would need to wait for test results to be sure. "Kill it." I don't know if these were my grandmother's exact words, but, as they didn't even wait for the test results, they may as well have been. I don't blame my grandmother. She's been rather touchy about the C word ever since my grandfather died of prostate cancer three years ago. People fill your head with the idea that, once you get to a certain age, you sort of come to terms with mortality. Bullshit. My grandfather lived to be 83. He traveled the world, had a successful business, raised three children, saw those children get married and have children, he met two great-grandchildren. I never heard the man talk about regret or start a sentence with, "I wish I'd . . . " but that man was afraid to die right up until the end. "Yeah, grandma. Mom told me."

The cat dying, finishing out 2008, having a birthday, and seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is too much of a reminder that the clock is ticking for one week. As a friend recently pointed out, "you grow up with your parents telling you that you're going to grow up to achieve great things. Then one day you realize that you're just like everyone else." I think Benjamin Button is supposed to teach us something about the way we experience life, but that's not what sticks with me. What sticks with me is, when Brad Pitt's character's daughter turns 1, he skips out on her and his partner and travels all over the world, supposedly it's what's best for everyone. That's the thing our parents don't tell us when they're filling our heads with the notion that, if we want, we can be doctors or astronauts or presidents. They don't tell us that getting what you really want out of life requires sacrificing the other things that you're supposed to really want out of life like family and paying the mortgage. I could write 10 hours a day if I didn't mind the idea of getting kicked out of my apartment and having to move back in with my mother. I could travel all over the world if I was okay with getting kicked out of my apartment and having to move back in with my mother upon my return. I can't actually think of any way to realize a life-long dream that doesn't involve having to move back in with my mother. That is except for the childhood dream of independence from my mother.  All I have to do to achieve that is keep working ten hours a day at a job I don't like, the job that I'm off to now. Take that, Brad Pitt. 

Tim Russert

There are lots of reasons that Tim Russert's death sucks. The thing that makes me saddest is no one loved politics more than this man. Now we're in the middle of the most historic election season of a generation, and now Russert doesn't get to experience it.

Poetry Kills

I just finished reading The Caged Owl, which is a collection of poems by Gregory Orr. Reading poetry is something that I've only recently gotten into. I think I don't have the attention span for prose right now. Anyway, there's this poem, "Everything," It goes like so:

Is this all life is then--

only the shallow breaths

I watch you struggle for?

That gasp right now--

if it was water

it would be such a small glass.

And I could lift your head

from the hospital pillow

and help you sip it

to comfort your parched

throat

into the ease of sleep.

Your agony makes no

sense when air

is everywhere, filling

this room where you lie

dying, where we move

as if in a trance, as if

everything is under water.

So anyway, this poem got me thinking about my grandfather. Not a huge leap since, once a person gets to the gasping for air portion of the living/dying process, the experience really sort of becomes universal. I was looking on my old blog for posts around the time my grandfather died. I remembered posting the eulogy that I wrote for him, and I wanted to give it a gander. I remember getting a couple laughs and a few tears, and I wanted to look back over my own brilliance. I went to October 10, 2006 and remembered that I pulled the eulogy after only a few days, because keeping it posted seemed lame or disrespectful or something. Instead what was there was the post the I put up just a few minutes after he died. I'll include it here. Why not?

Then Came the Dry Humping

Grandpa died last night, which sucks the proverbial ass.
Here are some funny things about the situation.
There's this nursing home on the way to Hospice in Dayton. I forget the last names of the families running it, but the initials are S and M. On the awning outside the entrance is written, "S&M". I'm picturing leather and latex clad funeral directors whipping the shit out of those dirty, naughty corpses.
There was this group of folks parading around the circular corridors of Hospice last night singing gospel music. The organ music was prerecorded, and it was rather creepy sounding. Very Count Chocula. One of the songs they sang went something like this, "King Jesus is a listenin' for the sinners to pray." That feels perhaps more suitable for a prison than a Hospice, but maybe they had a limited number of prerecorded numbers on their little ChristCasio 5000.
At one point last night, the aids came in to change my grandpa's bedding and his diaper (obviously this was before he died). I averted my eyes, not because I was embarrassed or ashamed, but because my first concrete memory of my grandfather is of his penis and I was very aware that I didn't want that to be my last memory as well. Not quite the book end of 25 great years of memories I'm interested in.

Like a Cat out of Hell Pt. II

I slept at my friends' house last night. They're on their honeymoon, so I'm rabbit sitting. Unlike my cat friend from the previous post, Sugar the rabbit does not try to kill me in my sleep. That coupled with the fact that my friends with the rabbit own season 3 of Frazier on DVD made the decision to stay over pretty easy.

When I came home this morning, Cat did not immediately come strutting out of my bedroom to say hello. I found this puzzling since he normally likes to lull me into a false sense of security when he first sees me. I walked into my kitchen to check on his food situation and found the above wreckage. I know this seems pretty cut and dry. He climbed above my cabinets, knocked over the bottle of Pernod which then landed on his food bowl, causing said food bowl to shatter. Here's the problem with that. Say the wall in my kitchen is ten feet long. The food bowl is at foot 0 while the Pernod bottle is at foot 4. How the fuck did this cat catapult the Pernod bottle 4 feet east? Does he have opposable thumbs? Did he knock it over then roll it down to the end of the cabinet before tossing it over? How did the bottle survive an 8 foot fall without breaking? Strange things are afoot is what I'm saying.

After I noticed the situation, I immediately panicked that my friend's cat's corpse, having bled to death, was going to have to be ferreted out from under my bed. This is not a phone call you want to make. "Hey friend, remember how you said your cat would find a way up on my cabinets and I stubbornly decided not to take the bottles down? Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is, you were right. Good for you for having such prophetic psychic abilities. The bad news is, I killed your cat. Fear not, I have a friend who owns a pet cemetery, and I'm sure once I explain the situation to her, she'll give you a good rate. Will you still be my friend?" I was thinking this and planning my escape to Mexico when Cat came around the corner, limbs in tact and both eyes in their respective sockets. As I write this, he's drinking out of my toilet.

And now I take the bottles down.

Harvey Korman

One of my heroes died today. Harvey Korman was a brilliant comedic actor who was best known to most as one of the cast members of The Carol Burnett Show. He was best known to me as one of Mel Brooks' go-to guys, costarring in such films as Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and History of the World Part I. While on The Carol Burnett Show, Korman was best known for the work he did with Tim Conway. He had a near impossible time keeping a straight face any time he and Conway acted in a sketch together. Below is one of my favorite such incidences. Korman plays the patient.

Waiting for the Sky to Fall

When I was little, the thing they told kids about tornadoes was, "they sound like a train." I didn't question what seemed like an absolute, so every time I heard a train whistle in the distance, I shit my pants a little.

When I was in the eighth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Bruns, showed my class a horrible made-for-t.v. movie called, The Day After. It was an uplifting little film about nuclear holocaust. Here's what I remember about that movie, after all the bombs went off, people started drinking well water without realizing that it was loaded with radioactive deliciousness. Someone had the unfortunate experience of being outside at the time of the explosion and was instantly blinded. Some man sat on an overturned cow carcass with a shotgun and blew anyone's brain's out who came near what was, presumably, the man's only food source. Steve Gutenberg, of Three Men and a Baby fame, got stir crazy and went outside, then, after a few days, his skin started rotting off. A few days after the explosion, a disgusting looking Gutenberg hobbled to the hospital to find it packed to the gills with people in varying degrees of gamma-ray-induced decay. A baby was born to symbolize hope. Jason Robards (an older, now dead, actor) went looking for his family, and when he got to where his house should have been, he just crumbled in a heap of despair and waited for flesh-eating death to take him away. After the movie, Mr. Bruns emphasized two things. First, the shit in these bombs has a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, if one ever goes off, even if you survive the initial blast, which you won't, you can never go outside again for the rest of your life or your flesh will rot off, begging the question, how many packets of Ramen Noodles should I buy to get through the next 80 years. Second, "this could totally happen. Right now, Russia has dozens of Nucs pointed right at us." The Cold War was over by this points, but I didn't sleep for five years. I grew up close to an air force base, and every time a cargo plane flew over my house, I thought the end had come.

There's a satellite falling out of the sky. It's expected to crash sometime in late February or early March. We're not to worry. In the past five years, 328 satellites have fallen out of the sky, and no one has been hurt. After all, the earth is mostly water. In the unlikely event that there is damage or injury, the government is fully prepared to offer some monetary compensation to the victim(s). At four-in-the-morning a few nights ago, when I was sleeping as deeply as I ever do, which is not deeply at all, a window rattling clap of thunder startled me and my heart nearly to death. My first disoriented thought was, the satellite has come early, and it's landed on the White Castle across the street.

Last night I dreamed that I was on a plane that crashed. No big deal, we were only hovering about ten feet from the surface of the ocean when we went down, and we landed on a sandbar. It was really more an inconvenience than anything else. As we switched planes and the young pilot responsible apologized for the mishap then took his seat in the new cockpit I turned to the flight attendant next to me and asked, "are they really going to let this guy fly this plane too?"

"Not to worry," she said, "he just gets it off the ground. Then the real pilot takes over from there." Apparently getting off the ground is the easy part.

Goin' Out In Style

I'm taking a fiction writing class, and though I love the class, it's making me want to scream. It's not that I can't tell a good story. It's not that I can't bullshit on just about anything and make people believe that I know what I'm talking about. It's just that I have to have some prompting. There's no fictional nugget dying to get out of my head right now. I suppose I could tell myself, I'm going to write a story about a boy who falls in love with his imaginary friend then gets institutionalized when his mom walks in on him and this imaginary friend in the throws of passion, because to her, it just looks like little Billy is humping the air. I could do that, but I'm not compelled to do that. I did have this one sentence that popped into my head as I was trying and failing to fall asleep last night. The sentence was, "dead is a strange way to describe your best friend." It's not brilliant. It's probably not even good, but I got to thinking about a character dealing with the sudden death of his best friend, and what that would be like. So, I'm sitting down to start writing, at this point any words on the page would feel like a victory, and I go to describe the casket only to realize that I have no idea what caskets are made of. I do the old blackle.com search for caskets, and stumble upon the most wonderful shit I have ever seen. If you'd like to check it out for yourself, here's the link http://www.casketstore.net/Special_Caskets.htm . You know how sometimes you'll be driving down the highway, and you'll come up to a van, and the whole rear windshield is some graphic of the Crucifixion? Or the American flag being raised at Iwo Jima? Or Sponge Bob? Well, that seems to be what they've done with these caskets. Friends, for the low, low price of $2863, you too can be buried in a steel box with the Last Supper Photoshopped onto it. Or a beautiful mountain scene. These, though novel, are not my favorites. My favorites are, "The Last Hole," complete with life-sized golf clubs and the 18th pin in the distance, this is the best way I can think of to honor a golfer; "The Race is Over," in this casket we have a side view of stock cars racing through the checkered flag; then there's my personal favorite, "Return to Sender," this classy casket is made to look like an ordinary package, wrapped in brown paper and held together with string, the words, "return to sender," printed in giant red ink across the lid.

Before I saw this website, I was emphatic about wanting to be cremated. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps it would be better to go for one of these flashy custom jobs. If anyone asks, I'll take the one with the Simpsons couch, with a picture of me sitting right next to Homer. "Doh!"