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September 9, 2007

Insomniac Scribbles

Descriptions that revolve during wee hours of unbidden wakefulness:

1. Cherchez la Pen
In the middle of the night, thinking of a possible way to start his memoir, he got out of bed and rooted around for a pen among the many odd ones (biros, disposable fountains, razor points, felt-tips, those with erasable green ink, bank-ad freebies, etc.) which had accumulated in a collection of disused coffee mugs carefully lined up on a shelf. There was a yellow mug with Chinese characters [for good luck? For caution hot beverage?]; a mug with his college logo (appropriately, it was Penn); one personalized with his mother’s name and a lugubrious owl on the obverse. There was a plain blue one with two white chips in the lip resembling a Nepalese mountain range; and a mug from Starbuck’s (the older style); and a mug on which was embossed an image of his former favorite dog breed, the Pekinese, before he switched allegiance to the Nova Scotia Duck-Tolling Retriever (and was even now awaiting via UPS the arrival of a mug bearing the mug of that dog from the NSDTR Enthusiasts Association). Every one of these cast-off cups, now crammed with pens, having been relegated to the superannuated rank of pen catch-alls, had been used at first to drink from. He was particular about both pens and coffee mugs, quickly tiring of the latter and replacing them one by one like so many quasi-discarded relationships that he was loathe to end definitively. This was as good a solution as any, to retain and discard simultaneously, since he kept them but in another guise. It was from the chipped blue that he finally chose a suitable instrument (a black-ink ballpoint) with which to begin his procrastinatory, minatory memoir.
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2. Misery is a clogged ear producing temporary deafness and precluding the ear plugs you normally (or not-so-normally) carry with you at all times. Every few hours you must cock your head at a right angle to the neck, like a heavy bloom bent upon a broken stalk, and apply an unctuous wax-softener unappealingly called “Debrox” by pinching the little plastic dispenser and having an awful ooze trickle ghoulishly into the ear canal. All the time you exist among maddeningly muffled sounds you regret every complaint against noise you’ve ever made and pray for the return of your normally hypersensitive, super-sharp hearing. You avoid the temptation to go spelunking with Q-tips because your otologist father had often scared you in childhood with horror stories of how they puncture (and permanently ruin) eardrums though unaccountably you store them by the hundreds (the Q-tips, not eardrums), always stocking up on the super kingsize family pak) despite the fact that, mainly for the sake of enjoying peace and quiet, you live alone.
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3. Misery also is a mosquito whose monstrous and implacable near-and-far whining bears an uncanny resemblance to the Doppler effect. In the middle of the night the insect grows into a monster like the human-eating alien tripods from The War of the Worlds, which you unwisely watched (disobeying your Still Small Voice) only hours ago and which, unfortunately, has you wide-eyed and mosquito-battling, and alien to sleep. Each time the invisible pillaging mosquito (is there more than one?) attacks (knuckles, ankles, wrist bones), you plunge a deep X with your thumbnail in each growing red hummock of the bites, an operation which, according to every summer-camp kid, is supposed to assuage the burning itch. That doesn’t work very well so you hope the self-inflicted X's will at least distract you from your lingering movie-terror. After a couple of hours of this losing battle you get up and run a scalding bath heavily laced with baking soda. Afterwards, to expunge the special horror effects, you switch on the TV looking for something soporific like reruns of This Old House. But what you tune in to and can’t turn off is Psycho.

Posted by Jane on September 9, 2007 1:45 PM

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