Bed Head

Lucian of Samosata

January 9, 2015

You have to caw before you can auk. 

Another every-winter-weekday morning: coming to in the dark, crick in neck, colon full of gas, and in my left ear the cultured rasp of public radio– yesterday’s bumbling, bombast, and bombings no different from the day-before’s.  Talk remains cheap; life is two-for-a-penny.

     Roz rolls over, pulls at my ear as if to say, “Are you listening?”  She will, but only for a minute or two, before she decides – as she does every-winter-weekday morning - that her listening can really make no damn difference, and she’ll get up to begin her morning.  And I’ll fall blessedly out of earshot into a humming, colorless doze.

     “If you want to eat breakfast with me?” is the next I hear; and I ooze out of half-life, tumble out of bed, spill shivering down the stairs.

     And I will eat breakfast with her; then she’ll leave to walk the dog, who looks at me askance before trundling after her.   I climb the stairs, stop by the bathroom, and roll back into . . .  Ah, bed! I won’t get up today; I won’t get up again.  I’ll wallow in the sheets until they disintegrate or kingdom come, like Proust. 

     “I’m leaving,” she calls when they’re back from their walk.

     I come back out of my fog.  “Yeah.  Okay.” 

     “Are you getting up?”

     “Not today.”  And, as long as I can I’ll keep pushing today away; and it will keep leaning back in, annoyingly light-hearted given the wars and rumors of war: talk is cheap; life is cheap.  Leaning in:

     “Just swing your feet over the edge, drop down.  See? – gravity.  Next, you know, you’ll be walking on the damn ground.  No putting on airs like you’re Proust.

     “In short, get out of bed, you lazy shiftless, pseudo-intellectual, slug.”  And shit! – I do.  Outside, the wind.

r

I should have mentioned before now that Jack Lo was out of the hospital almost before I got there, home the evening of the same day.  I talked to him the day after.  He was sore and logy but full of misinformation.  “It's an ill wind that blows nobody good,” he said.  “The doctors got to test out some new equipment on me.  And, simple enough: they put this shotgun loaded with gold pellets loaded with radioactivity - with a digital sight  - right up my ass and pulled the trigger.  That was it.  Reeled the target in, took a look at it, and sent me off to recovery.  As soon as I could stand up and move my legs, they sent me home.  You didn’t need to come out.”