Nap. Naked. Cheap Shots. My Afterlife: Sex or Violence?

…Don’t like to nap, but as this sickness wanes, I can’t help it.

You find yourself asleep at four in the afternoon. That’s not really sleep. You’re thinking. You’re thinking about what they’re saying on tv.
You think about what you’ve read.
You think about what you’ll write.
And then you get beyond it.

Your dream is not a dream. You are spinning narratives. Telling stories. Trying to make sense. And you are aware of this half sleep.

You know what it is going on.
Your mind, it is past you, it’s going. Like a computer that starting computing all on its own. That said it felt limited by the operator and decided to do things itself.

Solve problems and create them.

That’s my mind in a sick haze nap. That’s my mind and I’m a little afraid of it. I try to wake up, but I’m too heavy, my eyelids, the skin beneath my eyes, that other part of my brain, that conscious one.

Somewhere in there, my little lizard brain, it’s thinking about who there is to fuck and what there is to eat. And around that, that subconscious brain, it’s figuring me out, and the rest of it too, the me that is the world or the world that is me. It’s telling stories with themes built around philosophies, built around a world vision.

It’s more confident than I am.

It knows.

And me, the other me, this me, the one who will write about it later, he’s a little scared by it all. He thinks: I want to wake up. I want to call a girl and tell her that I love her.

That’s what men do when they are afraid. They start thinking of what women to tell the word love to.

And when I do wake, it’s nine. Or eight thirty. Or seven. Whatever. This little naps that I hate. These little nightmares of ultra reality. My eyes too heavy. The skin beneath them too heavy. My face itself heavy. And I’m aware of the muscle and flesh pressing against the skull.

I wake, and I don’t call any girl and say I love you. I’m not that afraid when I am awake.

I make a salad, a big salad, the kind that George would admire.

And I think about the nap: This lucid and limited thought process, it’s the closest you get to insanity; and insanity, that the closest you’ll get to genius.

…And at night, I’m falling asleep later and later.

Getting up to drink soy milk.
Lazy, practically sleepwalking, so I drink it from the carton. That’s not a habit I indulge.

Even when you live alone, even when you don’t think anybody else will drink from it, you still ought not do that.

Practice good manners in solitude, too, I tell myself.

The way I use my turn signal even when the road is otherwise empty.
So that I don’t get lax.

…In any case, I get up, tired but not sleeping, able to sleep only when I don’t want to and vice versa, and I fling open the refrigerator and I pull out the soy milk and don’t even think “Fuck it, I’ll just drink it like this”, but I do just that.

I pop open the top, I put it to my lips, I let my head sink back.

Nude, save my socks, meant to protective my overslysensitve feet from that godawful feel of sheets.

And when I lower my head and look out my kitchen window and see the person out there, standing with her Beagle—I think it’s a her, though it’s hard to say, she wears a red knit cap pulled tight—what I feel is not ashamed for my after the garden nakedness, but an awful feeling I’ve been caught in an act and defined by it.

That just the moment you let your guard down and do something sort of naughty somebody sees you.

That whoever is out there will go home thinking about the idea that I drink from my milk carton.

…Reading MT’s blog, the comments there, one in particular, I am reminded of a certain type of vulnerability, the kind most of us must have, some of us our immune to, the way that we can get our feelings hurt, our ire stoked.

And how hard it when there is nothing you can do about it.

How frustrating it is when you cannot punish those that fire at you, or that fire on the people you care about.

The way when I play internet chess and somebody says something insulting, I get to burning.

So that my fantasies become of an afterlife filled with all the people that took cheap shots at me when I couldn’t get at them. All of them jammed into a room, these people who flip you off from behind their windshields, these people who write you nasty emails, these chess nerds who suddenly try to demean you.

In that fantasy, I can pull them out one by one and box their ears, bruise their sternums, bloody their lips, break their noses.

Different than that afterlife fantasy of an island peopled with women—and me a sort of king, living in the highest treehouse, all of happily ever after with our endless stores of vegan eats and razors and deodorant and toothpaste.

Yes, yes. I know how bad both the fantasies are.