So I rally should be working on my finals, but I can’t help but feel the need to document what’s been happening to me (mostly for writing and posterities sake).
Things have been stressful to say the least. Which is always true, but lately it’s been 20 time worse what it normally is.
Most of you who know me know that I have nightmares off and on and always have. As i’ve gotten older I don’t mind the classic nightmares so much, they even occasionally lead to good story ideas.
But the past month I’ve had two separate cases of Sleep Paralysis.
Apparently during REM sleep your brain sends out a message to your body to keep it from moving so that you don’t injure yourself. Sleep paralysis occurs when you wake from REM suddenly but your body is still in full paralysis.
Often times your brain is still dreaming, but your also somehow awake and unable to move.
- you may feel a weight on your chest
- you may hear other people in the room that aren’t there
- it may feel like hours like this
- you may hallucinate
- you can’t open your eyes
Seep paralysis is the basis for a lot of ghost, alien, and demon beliefs. Once you’ve gone through it you can understand why. The first time I thought I was dying, literally. I had Mike Doughty’s “Grey Ghost” stuck in my head, which is about Jeff Buckley’s overdose on heroin, and I thought there was someone sitting on the edge of my bed as I died of an overdose. I struggled to scream and I couldn’t.
The second time was just sheer terror at the fact it was happening again. I was so scared for no reason. I could hear people outside my room and I kept trying to roll myself off the bed and crawl out to beg for help. The closest I got was being able to twitch my hand and when I did I could tell that the cat was there, which would calm me down because she wasn’t part of the hallucination so I’d realize I was dreaming and be okay for a few minutes. Sure enough though I would drift back into the hallucination and it would start all over again until I could feel the soft fur of the sleeping cat by my side.
I’m actually having a minor anxiety attack typing this. It’s made sleeping so much more difficult, because I have this added level of anxiety about it happening again.
Sleep paralysis is remarkably common, over the course of a lifetime more people than not will experience it once. It can be due to stress, bipolar phase shifts, excessive drinking, sleeping on your back, etc.
What’s amazing is while I’m totally terrified of having it happen again, I also completely want to capture that feeling in a way in my writing.
Hands down it was the scariest thing that have ever happened to me. Scarier than any nightmare or breaking into a haunted house.
So while 90% of me is terrified it’ll happen again, 10 % is terrified it won’t because being in that in between was like being in the space after you finish an intense round of yoga or meditation. It was like doing too many opiates. It was like touching something that you aren’t supposed to touch and knowing that that space is what all mystics and madmen spend their lives searching for.
I feel like if I could find it again and not be scared, it might be different . . .
Pabst created the 6-pack because they judged it was the weight most easily carried home by a housewife from the store. I consider this fact and smile as I grab a half case of PBR from the back fridge of the 7-11 and head up to the counter. It’s only four blocks home and I won’t even need to switch hands. The Indian man behind the counter eyes me lecherously, but not unpleasantly, with a smile as I deposit the change back in my bra and head on my way at 4am.
The air is finally cool, Hurricane Earl heading his way up the coast, and I’m happy to have the walk. The neighborhood, which is new to me, smells of trash and heat escaping pavement.
I walk past empty Corona bottles and burnt offerings to the god of summer dwindling. My head is filled with my bartending shift and the fact that I’ve been in New York a year.
In that year I’ve refocused my personality. I’m not necessarily different, but New York is a scalpel to Philadelphia’s baseball bat when it comes to matters of growth. I’m more comfortable in my skin and expect less for twice the amount of work. To some that might sound like a bad thing, I think to people who make it here, it just sounds right.
I pass by the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner from my place and the smell of sugar and dough rises in the breeze. I’ve never wished more for a deck overlooking a body of water to sit out on and watch the sun shift slowly into Saturday. I sigh and think for the fortieth time this week that I’m so glad to be here.
My neighborhood is either South Slope or Gowanus depending on who you ask. It’s a balanced mix of hispanics and auto-body repair shops with a growing percentage of people like me who moved here for the great bars and the safe streets.
Every person has their own New York. No really. There are no two New Yorks, and there is no right or wrong. I found mine on a deserted one way street with only four or five ramshackle houses and a large number of warehouses. Sometimes it smells like exhaust, sometimes donuts. The tacos are cheap and plentiful, and the nights are quieter than anything in my head. If I’m capable of happiness by any standards, I’m happy here.
I climb the flight of stairs to my apartment and plant myself on my kitchen floor. I have a bourbon and a can of beer to alternate drinking from. I sit by the window so I can smoke without moving. I think about my day, how my back hurts, why I’m dissatisfied with graduate school and my job, and why I love and hate the place where night slides wordlessly into morning.
Did I mention I’m in grad school? I’m 9 credits and a thesis away from a master’s in nothing useful. If you are considering going to grad school because you think think it’ll improve your life, I’d like to offer some advice: don’t. No really, an M.A. is a bill of goods, and you’d be better off putting that money into a time share in Reno than on most graduate programs in the humanities. If however you are like me and love learning without reward and have no idea what else to do, by all means, please sign up and enjoy the most expensive soul searching a person can undergo.
My program funds the more high level M.F.A. students, so they can go on to teach composition poorly at state run universities and prisons. All of the great things I’ve learned have been accidental and in that regards depressing. Still, I love reading and learning and thinking, so I persist.
There’s a one sentence email waiting for me when I get home. I’m ecstatic to read it:
Are you still looking for a bartending job?
It’s from a resume I sent out a week earlier to a place I was really interested in. I know it will likely lead to nothing, but I smile still the same. You learn here that the little victories are enough. The reply on one resume out of ten is amazing and boosts my spirit enough to redouble my efforts.
Oh, why am I looking for work? I have a full time bartending job already. Except it’s kind of like bartending in prison. It’s the sort of place where people give you $2 on a $40 check and look at you like your an ass if you don’t proceed to wash their feet with your hair. Believe it or not, that wasn’t even what did me in there. I can live with cheap morons.I can even deal with the bar fights and the occasional human feces found on the floor. But I recently got a new bar manager who’s idea of managing me is to talk to me like I’m an absolute moron. I can handle it from the customers, but I can’t take it from my boss. It’s time to go. It might take me a while to get out, but I’m fine with working hard. The rewards are sweeter that way anyhow.
On my dirty kitchen floor I try to write. This has been the albatross of New York. No lack of ideas, but a lack of cogent sentences. My form has gone all wavy and my verbs have gone all limp. I have the writing equivalent of whiskey dick, so desperate to do the deed, so incapable of satisfying myself or anyone else.
I’m working out the whys and the hows. It’s a process because even though writer’s block is a bit of a myth, writer’s tennis elbow is a very real thing. I want to write and I do write, but I’ve lost the narrative, the signal, the drive. It’s somewhere in the pathways, but it isn’t here. Still I fight for it.
I’m out of touch most days. It isn’t anything about New York per se. So much of this life is wrapped up in talking, being, and doing, that when I get five minutes to myself I often just need to sit and stare. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I became great at working in restaurants. And while I love that, it takes up 100% of my personality in 35 hours a week. Then I try to find another 20% to give to my school life, and another 50% to give to the man I love, and another 30% to give to friends, and the next thing I know I’m flat on my back in my kitchen with a beer and some bourbon and wondering why I’m so drained. I dont’ regret a single percent, but I am always two steps behind and totally brain dead.
The man in my life? Yeah, I know, it’s crazy. But he and I have been together over a year and we’re still as gross as we were the day we met. I don’t talk about him much because I’m terrified of jinxing things. Still, he is the best part of every day.
The sky is not lightening yet, and I leave burnt effigies of late summer in the form of cigarettes as I pour myself a second round.
My thoughts turn to the prophecies of Zevon and the small kindness here in New York. Both weigh heavily in my brain lately.
They are the alternatives to the early morning meanderings of things long lost. Though I suppose Warren would understand those too.
There is an aspect of forgetfulness that New York promises. With each new dawn, the chance to start over. I put on something bittersweet on iTunes and decide it’s time to turn to poetry that will never see the light of day. The time for narrative is lightening into the time for Ginsberg’s golden rule, no ideas but in things.
I no longer care if my story is sympathetic. I no longer need to be the hero of this life. Tomorrow is occurring and I will wake lather, rinse, repeat and try only to do it better.
I own a lint brush for company, but never use it myself because I never need to look that presentable.
She made herself breathe. If she couldn’t breathe she couldn’t think and she wanted, for the time being at least, to be able to think. To see a way out. The darkness made her heart seem more present, its beats faster. It always had. Something in its infinite quality frightened her, the way a squeaking wood door in the night did, or the sound of a gruff voice barking her name. She made herself breathe.
Her bare feet rubbed against the cheap carpet square that never meant for anyone to touch it for too long, feeling more like fake grass than fiber. Her toes wiggled against the plastic lining of the trunk.
Her palms were sweaty and paralyzed behind her, facing away from her back, she could reach out an inch and feel along the jagged metal line of something. A bit of rust, a seam in metal. She imagined it was a tool box. No clue to what was next, only facts outlining the mental image of herself.
It was oppressively silent. the physics of the car speeding up, slowing down and pausing was accompanied by no sirens, no music, no voices. She made herself breathe and listened deeper. There was a rattle below her, like a mouse in a can. The car lurched left and the rough sound of gravel crunched below. Occasional pings, like BB gun bullets from Bobby’s rifle, hit the underside of the car.
Her tongue was thick and she thought that fear tasted metallic. She concentrated hard on creating saliva, wanting to wash the taste of it away. She lost the picture of herself in her mind’s eye again and began to hyperventilate.
She knew how to stop a panic attack. In the dark, when she heard footsteps on wooden stairs or felt stale breath too close, she could close her eyes and wait. She could breathe and picture herself alone and safe. When she would open them again she would be fine. But now there was no difference between her eyes open or shut.
She felt like she had to pee and began to cry. Her mind’s eye returning to see herself curled in her pajama shorts and an old stained t-shirt in the dark, worried what people would think if they found out she had pissed herself. She wanted to be out of the dark, where thoughts like that ran round her mind. She wanted to be out of the dark, where she could choose to close her eyes and be fine.
The car finally rolled to a stop, her body felt the slight incline of a hill towards her back. The release of the door but not the sound of it closing a moment later. She expected the harsh sound of work boots, but instead found the softer sound of shoes against the gravel, a cautious crunch, a lightness to them.
The key scraped the metal and she imagined it turning as she heard the cylinders move. The trunk popped. Two inches of light blinding her. She heard the gruff bark of her name and closed her eyes against the light.
Well if this shows up I guess the answer is yes.
Long story short: I don’t blog much while in a relationship because I have someone to tell my crazy to. Sorry.
However I’m having a bitch of a time with writing lately and so I’m going to try posting some reworked writing exercises on here for motivation and polishing.
So when you see stuff that doesn’t make any sense, it’ll just be my writing.
I’ll include an explanation of the prompt in the subject line in parenthesis so if you want you can see what I was working with.
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