Falling Asleep

Last night, for the first time in almost 20 years, I fell asleep with my headphones on. In and of itself, this isn’t technically an unusual thing, but I’m notoriously obsessive-compulsive when it comes to my bedtime habits; always have been. I sleep on the same side of the bed, almost always fall asleep in the same position (on my stomach, on arm folded up underneath my pillow) and usually require as much of a sensory-deprived atmosphere as possible. When it’s time to lie down, I don’t like being able to see my hand in front of my face and, aside from requisite ambient noise — a distant train whistle, nighttime critters in the forest just outside our back door, air conditioning or heat clanging on — I will physically attack anything that makes a sound. It’s why the cat is afraid to purr, and why our neighbors now have three extra deadbolts on their door. But yesterday, I worked for nearly 14 hours straight, a mixture of bartending and waiting tables, and I was on my feet for every minute of it. Add in the taxing mental aspect — keeping track of a dozen customers at once, including orders, drinks, checks, tips, and wanting to get the hell out of there — and I was a wreck when I got home. Michelle had been busy, too, and I think our entire conversation that night was conducted in a series of grunts and flails, like some sort of groggy Italian fishmongers. I had to be back at work at 7:30 the next morning, she had to be at softball practice by 9 a.m., so both of us were ready to turn our lives off for a few hours. Michelle sleeps with her iPod on every night. It’s usually a podcast — either Savage Love, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, an old Lost program — or some brand of quasi-symphonic pop-rock: Florence and the Machine, or The National. Everything she listens to has something of a narrative, a story, a structure. Her mind, I think, soothes itself by navigating these predetermined trajectories, taking a sort of subconscious comfort in the procession from beginning to expounding to conclusion. It’s an interesting choice, and one that sets up a dichotomy ripe for analysis. She’s a writer as well — a much more diligent one than myself — and the structure of her soon-to-be-published (New Ohio Review) nonfiction piece is, to use technical jargon, wonky. Though loosely chronological, she weaves personal, real-life experiences with snippets of fairy tales, a recipe for chismol (a kind of Honduran relish), newspaper articles and even YouTube links. It’s a hell of a read, and a surprisingly restrained one, in spite of its apparent scattershot nature. She spends a great deal of time exploring and working out new methods and approaches to constructing her work, and this more structured input helps to wind her brain down. Structure, then, becomes ambient. I can’t do that. If I listen to anything with a preset frame, my mind automatically latches onto it. This works out well if I’m listening to something while I’m, say, on the treadmill at the gym or writing a column. It’s not a matter of zoning out, but of comprehensively shifting my focus to one, supposedly inane, thing in order to be able to accomplish the actual task at hand. Which brings me back to last night: I fell asleep somewhere around the sixth minute of Sunn O)))’s “Black One.” If you know anything about this, you know it’s a dismal, f***ed up album by a band known for making dismal, f***cked up albums. Though they’ve flirted with melody in recent years, their music always tends to sound like a gob of toxic sludge struggling to come to terms with its own existence. On “Black One,” that gob bakes itself mercilessly in the sun. It’s roughly 15 minutes of low-end, brown-note drone, punctuated by shrieks of static and something resembling chords. I saw the guys play a show in Atlanta a few years ago with vocalist Attila Csihar (Mayhem, Keep of Kalessin, et.al.), and it was the most psychedelically evil thing I’ve ever seen. Csihar wore a cloak made entirely of mirrors. I might still be there, for all I know. I don’t think my falling asleep under such circumstances had more to do with one element (my weariness after a day inundated with structure and numbers) or the other (the nature of the music). Each, rather, informed and fed the other. It was a case of chaos married to, shaping itself around, form. Think Ouroborus devouring his own flayed tail. In a way, this runs parallel to my and Michelle’s life right now — maybe to yours, too. We both have jobs, we’ve got cats and cable, go to the gym regularly and drink beer. Our lives, in the context of immediacy, are structured. We find ourselves, however, in chronic flux, working towards something greater; if one of us landed a fellowship, won a major writing award or got a great job offer, we’d be out of here in a heartbeat. To that end, we spend a good deal of our spare time doing one of the hardest things in the world: working with Just Words to achieve Something Greater. There is also, I think, something of a political undercurrent. As both the Wisconsin recall and the presidential election approach, chaos, as it always does around this point in the game, seems to reign. But everything has its due process: factions bicker, then make up, corral themselves behind a figurehead, even if they’d rather eat rocks. The two sides duke it out nastily, with the most incendiary rhetoric this side of a Stone Cold Steven Austin promo. The loser concedes to the winner, and we all start talking about the next cycle. What seems formless, what seems un-tethered, is a sequence as sure and ubiquitous as the golden ratio. The last thing I remember hearing last night was a single note, void of distortion, ringing lightly but clearly under the monolithic drone. I don’t know what I thought as I closed my eyes and slipped from my consciousness. I hope it was something along the lines of “someday.”    You Might Also Like: