It’s 6:46 a.m. No,it’s only a little after 6. Or maybe it’s 4:53.It wouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because it’s all the same time. It’s those hours between falling asleep and before the Earth rolls back around to face the sun. Some call it predawn, or better, the obscurity; I call it the “robscurity” because of what waking too early can steal from your sense of inner peace and ease.
Whatever personal or financial struggles you managed to put to bed along with your brain scant hours before will return for a full accounting if you awaken in the robscurity. You might even pick up a few new neural hitchhikers; for me, death is an unwelcome frequent-flier. Here’s just a sampling of what you could ponder in your uneasy bed:
I need to make out that will today. You can be 43 years old and in prime health with nary a chest pain in sight, and this thought will seize you at some point in the very early morning hours. I wonder how many lawyers have received emails time-stamped 5 a.m. because of this.
So if I check that organ donor box on my license, will they really make sure I’m no longer of this world first? This is a classic for me, along with Will The Funeral Home Really Be Sure I’m Dead Before Cremating Me and Does That Med Student In The Morgue Really Know How To Judge Death. The general sense of “nope, don’t wanna be mistaken for dead” stems from something I read in childhood, I’m certain, and was fortified several years ago when my beloved cat Sylvester had a stroke at home. I was with him when he died shortly after… but I wasn’t really sure he had stopped breathing, so I drove him wrapped in a towel to the vet to find out. (This is not as idiotic as I sound; the body undergoes processes of postmortem respiration and such that can make it feel like it’s moving or still passing air along inside, to the untrained examiner. Also, I was upset and maybe a little idiotic.)
I am never going to have a decent job again. You don’t need me to tell you what this one is like, since nearly everyone has had that vocation that forces them to wonder just how bad it would be - really - to sell their soul to the Devil or their body to Google as a moving billboard. Mine was a series of concurrent part-time and odd jobs in my early thirties that I mostly liked, but weren’t exactly providing me with much of a sense of, shall we say, cash.
I am never going to have a job again. This is exclusively the province of the unemployed. I hope very few of you have ever lain awake with this in your head. If so, thinking about death is an effective distraction.
Is that a water spot on the ceiling, and is it getting bigger? Nothing is more frightening than the prospect of yet another drawback of homeownership creeping in to bite you on the ass. Repairs are expensive, but there’s little more immediately compelling and expensive than anything involving water. At least in a flooded basement the water will eventually drain down; the problem with a leaky roof is the water will eventually drain down.
Is that thumping a home invader or just the cats fighting? I mean, does it matter? The important part is IT WOKE YOU UP AND NOW YOU’LL NEVER GET BACK TO SLEEP IN TIME TO GET ENOUGH REST BEFORE THE ALARM GOES OFF.
Maybe it was neither; maybe it’s Cthulhu. Put your mind at ease. It’s not Cthulhu, because that thing makes its home on the bottom of the sea and only rises to capsize ships and devour small boats. Unless you live in a houseboat, in which case, good luck.
How do you know it’s not Cthulhu? No, you make a fair point. But consider: This denizen of the deep is not going to be in your stairwell or out in the living room. If it ventures to land, it will be straight from the ocean through the series of deeply-dug tunnels through the Earth’s strata, far below basement level.
Wait, tunnels? I’ve clearly said too much.
Who built those- Hey, could that headache you’ve had for two days be a brain tumor?
Oh God, what if I have a brain tumor? There you go. Better call and ask about that will first thing in the morning. Better yet, just get up and dash off a quick email now so you don’t have to remember it later.
-November 18, 2019