Varieties of Disturbance

1. I sprang out of bed this morning at 5:45 AM. My back cried, Enough! Enough of being patient all week with a saggy, dangerous maniac that dared to call itself a mattress!

2. Or maybe I was already re-setting my clock. A need to be back inside the parameters of the home time zone.

3. In the dilated time that is residency time, all the usual waking-up anxieties disperse: the missing of dead people, the shock of frittering away one’s time, the minor terrors of the social world, etc. etc. Perhaps people travel in order to feel something like this.

4. At the same time, the unrelenting single-mindedness of it all provokes in one a ceaseless desire for more air, i.e., a need for full-bodied yawns at the dinner table. Who would expect to miss pushing the lawnmower up the hill, or walking down the basement steps with a heap of musty laundry on the arms?

5. Upon waking up, I felt for glasses in the usual space where I keep them: on the floor, just inside the mattress frame, on my side—the left side--of the bed. I did not find my glasses immediately, but instead found my copy of Varieties of Disturbance, which I’d thought I’d left in the seat-pocket ahead of me on the plane. So glad was I to have my book back, I lay back on the killing mattress with the book on top of my chest, grateful for its modest weight on me.

6. Yes, there is the occasional palm in coastal Washington state. We applaud their fortitude.