Though I’m sure this isn’t technically true, it seems — at least in my mind, where I sometimes rewrite the truth to suit my purposes — that every morning for the past few weeks I wake up (temporarily — that’s what snooze is for) at exactly 8:15 AM and check my phone to see a little pop-up news item telling me that someone has died. MCA, or Maurice Sendak, or someone whose name I don’t recognise but probably should. It’s a terrible way to wake up. I often try to go back to sleep after this, because my dog doesn’t like to get his walk until after noon (I don’t know why!) and I usually don’t go to sleep very early, but for the past month or so I’ve been having terrible nightmares that only get worse when the last thing I read is that someone has passed away. Also, not that this matters and not that I have been able to milk any meaning from it, my nightmares are often set to Pearl Jam songs, such as “Red Mosquito.” The last time I listened to a Pearl Jam album was three months ago (Live on Two Legs, if you were curious), so I’m not only disconcerted by the LOUD AND ANGRY (but, of course, deeply satisfying) guitar riffs that accompany the eerily vivid visions of, like, lying to my family that I’ve been given a four-hundred thousand dollar writing grant and then immediately explaining that, no, that was a lie (and then their faces — so disappointed! And their hurt response of “Why did you do that?” and me just yelling “I DON’T KNOW!”), I’m weirded out by the lack of context of my REM soundtrack.
Granted, Pearl Jam has been the background noise to a lot of my least favourite moments in life. It’s a shame: I like Pearl Jam. It’s just a sad coincidence that I happened to be really into Ten when I was being a dumb and unhappy pre-teenager doing math classes in a seemingly endless gray South Carolina suburb, or that I bought Live on Two Legs during a hot and sweaty summer during which time a mentally ill and physically gigantic man put his hand down the back of my pants one day. With my step-brother. We were on our way to lunch and in the crush of people walking with us under some scaffolding, I felt some sweaty foreign object stuff itself into my low-rises and shrieked so loudly that everybody around me startled, including the person who had casually molested me. My step-brother, against my protests, chased him (probably weighing a deuce fifty, with a big fluff of blond hair and surrounded by the odor of his own (I assume) pee) until he crossed the street and was lost in a blur of cars. I don’t know what he planned to do to him, but I really appreciated the gesture. This memory had been lost for years under a big laundry pile of more savoury memories, but after a good old fashioned nightmare it tends to reappear, and reminds me that it is one of the reasons I order takeout like a shut-in and walking around (when absolutely necessary) with 360-degree paranoid vision.
“Nothingman” in my dream-head as I’m getting off and on (and off and on) the ramps to Yorba Linda, with nothing on the radio to replace it. The radio is broken. You can’t turn the dial on your XM subconscious. It’s so strange: awake, I’m happy. In fact, I’ve never been happier: I have wonderful friends, I don’t have any rashes covering my body or loved ones who are sick or a broken car (my car has a dent, that’s true, but it runs). I have health insurance and I’m loved and love in return, so pretty much all of the bases are covered, and covered in buttercream icing. But lately every morning I wake up at 8 and see that someone has died, and perhaps that’s just kind of thing that sounds the cyclical Groundhog Day (“I’ve Got You Babe”/”Even Flow”) ticking that turns my neurotic brain on after I shut the lights. Or it could be the fact that I’ve been eating capers, and though there’s no proof for this, I have started to believe that capers are nightmare seeds. During none of my dreams is there a large man with wandering hands wreaking havoc on pedestrian traffic, but every time I wake up I think of this instance as if it were the seminal moment of my entire life. Because it was like a nightmare, weird and unanticipated and contextless like a nightmare. Maurice Sendak dies and all I get is the uncomfortable sensation that my pants need padlocks, pajamas soaked in sweat. Why can’t I dream about a fun party where someone’s playing “Corduroy” and everybody is laughing and drinking magical dream drinks with meringue floaters? Why, instead, do I dream of being trapped in a cold shower that’s raining ants and “Corduroy” is playing backwards from Satan’s boombox? It’s these stupid, morbid New York Times updates. And the capers.
One of the most fascinating aspects of human life is the irrational and mysterious subtext: as happy as you are, there is misery all around you. It creeps into your sleep and texts you obituaries. There is your past, and your future, and neither one has any emotional insurance policy to protect you from finding relics (or foreshadowing undertoads) of them floating around in your chardonnay — less like black flies, more like red mosquitoes. Maybe they’re there to remind you of how tightly you should cling to the sunny present, to take nothing for granted, to buy tunics while you’re not in the red. But seriously: 8 in the AM? That’s not the time of day when anyone can appreciate being alive, or being happily unpestered, or having things like happiness and family and security and a dog who sleeps in. It’s a bleak time, when you’re not sure if you’re awake or asleep, and when you could just as easily exist in any of the realities that have surrounded you throughout your life (the SATs, the unprepared dress rehearsals, the bad phone calls, the sirens behind you on the freeway) — or worse realities, realities you haven’t even shaken hands with yet. It’s unfair; it suggests that you need to start waking up at five so that you’ve had enough coffee to remind yourself what’s real and what are simply your nightmare’s spiderwebs sticking to your fuzzy brain — and that the happier you are awake, the more your dreams will try to show you up, for contrast, because dreams are sadistic that way. Maurice Sendak was born in 1928, after all. He was 84. That’s a pretty decent amount of time on earth, you tell yourself as you stir your coffee and try not to measure out your own life with your spoon.
The only song I’ve heard today is Kanye West’s “Through the Wire.” For once, the radio wasn’t feeling like playing “Jeremy.” Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up at ten thirty and turn on my phone to find that Pearl Jam is releasing an album of Lovin’ Spoonful covers AND THAT’S IT FOR THE NEWS. I suppose it makes sense that when things are going well, and you wake up to discover that someone has kicked the bucket, your primary emotion is horror at the idea of leaving such a wonderful life behind. That fear mutates into a representation of disappointing people (by dying, as you were disappointed by the death of MCA), becoming lost in a tangle of roadways (one of which, undoubtedly, will send your car flying off into the abyss as in Beetlejuice), or showering in stinging insects (the kind of physical pain that would lead a person to want to jump out the window to their doom — I mean, come on, ants are the worst). It makes me think that, during the day, Elm Street was probably like a bucolic Disneyland of fun-loving teenagers. And to think: that was before people had apps to shit on their mornings before they hit the snooze button. They had to rely on Freddy Krueger.
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