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I've woken up most mornings in the last 5-10 years in a depression,
I know that's difficult to square with the SPECIAL NOTICE I made all the very necessary effort to include, entirely out of character, right out at the top, but I want to be clear: I'm being incredibly literal here. I'm making no attempt to be clever or misdirect or disguise intent. That is the purview of punsters and others species of fraud-peddlers in the Hack genus. I'm a normal man, classifiable strictly using the Normal Man categories of... whatever other words might go before or after "genus" in a biological taxonomy, I forget. I'd learned all that briefly for a junior college anthropology survey class, but I purged it all immediately after the final and filled the space with more trivia about Claremont-era X-Men, Mario Kart track layouts... almost exclusively anything in the opposite direction of projecting sexual appeal in the early/mid 1990s.
No, I'm speaking to you plainly here, which if you're a new reader (we get one every 11-14 years, so we might be due!) you might not know is incredibly typical of me. Straight shooter. Blunt. To the point. Well, as much as one can be in a 3,000 word piece stitched together out of single-sentence large-block paragraphs and more subordinate clauses than an Elon Musk birthing-partner pre-procreation contract. Is the language torturous? Maybe. But the points, once you get to them, are almost always crystal clear, in the times I can be bothered to remember to have one.
OK, sometimes I'm out here be-boppin' my way through a masturbatory tone-poem of free flowing word association that makes sense probably only to me, but the point is: NOT TODAY! Today I'm being literal. I want you to hear this: l i t e r a l .
I've woken up most mornings in the last 5-10 years in a depression,
I mean that my mattress has gotten old and I only sleep on one side. So in a literal sense, I've been waking up, in increasing degrees over the passage of time, along a portion of the surface of a plane that is at a slightly lower elevation to the surfaces on all sides of me. There's a depression in my mattress.
Emotionally? Totally fine with it. Well, I guess the depression did leave me a little sad from time to time when I would realize "don't I deserve better?" but that is STRICTLY a coincidence. I have more personal dignity and respect for you, gentle reader than to try to slip "the depression made me sad" past you. If I tried to just leave that there, uncommented upon, sure, this blog would be like 75% shorter, but we'd all be so embarrassed.
Is this too much work to tell you I got a new mattress finally? After like 20 years wearing down the old one? And what the consequences are of being so compulsively averse to deviation from the comforts of repetition that even after my now-ex-wife moved out OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I've stayed sleeping in the same spot on the same side?
DO NOT start reading things in now, I've warned you. I've lived a full spectrum life in those times. "Over time the depression grew" is facile and beneath all of us, and frankly a denigration of the complexity of my nuanced and varied emotional being. It's been 20 years in the making. Many life events! Many relationships! Several pets! Sure, as I said, I can be rigid and locked-in to certain physical routines and take great comfort in expected outcomes, especially when pleasurable or tied to feelings of safety and/security, like for example sleeping, but that doesn't mean the beat-up, floppy, sunken-in mattress represents anything specific about who I am as a person or how I'm getting on. It was just time! Because of how it was depressing! I mean that literally!
And once every year or two, you rotate it so you're sleeping on a new part of it, even though you know you're just causing a depression on the other end. And even as much as you'd like to flip it over entirely, with the pillow-top technology, you can't really, so rotate all you want, you know deep down you're limited to existing on the same surface, tidally locked, where every rotation is just another step toward the inevitable future rotation where the same circumstances play out again and again in a space, while technically differing, is functionally and materially indistinguishable. It feels new, but in the end, for all your efforts, no matter how you feel in the moment, you're weighing a thing down to the end of its design-life and incrementally toward its eventual entropic scattering into atomic nothing.
Ah shit. I almost made it to the end.
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