It's a dark night in a
suburb without streetlights. But on the first floor of a split-level
home in the heart of Ravens Way, one man is trying to figure out why he
is the way he is and committing what he finds to paper: Guy Verbose,
introspective private eye.
__________________________
The Big Deletion
Tonight, I’ve already watched a movie, eaten food I shouldn’t have, and watched the tail end of a silly cop show. I also spent some time writing and posted it to my website. Now I’m lying on the living room couch in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and wondering what to do with myself.
I should go to bed, but the sooner I fall asleep, the sooner I have to go to work. I hate my job, so I stay up out of spite.
Granted, I don’t stay up as late as I used to. Now that I’m older, dragging my nights out to 2:00 am is no longer in the cards. That said, I do occasionally find myself on the couch at 12:30 or even 1:00 am. Am I tired the next day? Absolutely, but you know, I never seem to regret it.
The experts call this behavior “bedtime procrastination” and say the desire for autonomy is a leading psychological reason for such behavior.
“Our lives are often dictated by external obligations like work, family, and social commitments. This leads to a subconscious desire to reclaim control over one’s time, creating a sense of choice and a ‘tomorrow aversion.’ The time spent procrastinating may represent a moment of rebellion against the burdens placed upon us during the day.”(1)
Guilty as charged. (Revolution now!) I mean, who the fuck is in charge here?
This is the thing about autonomy: exercising it feels great, but acting in one’s own interest can set off a chain of events whose outcomes can’t always be predicted. Yes, the ramifications of a person staying up later than he should or Meta going hog wild on advertising are easy to forecast, but who would have guessed that dropping my social media would leave me raw-dogging my bedtime procrastination?
Oh well, I guess I’ll read a book.
______
Notes:
(1) This quote comes from the article, "8 Reasons Why People Resist Going to Bed," available on the Psychology Today website.
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Older Guy Verbose stories ....
The Big Conversation
Wednesday, July 1. 5:30 pm. It was hot in Ravens Way, and the afternoon
sun was flooding in the front windows, warming up the living room. I was
lying on the couch watching a rerun of Law and Order and trying to
forget about the workday that just ended and the one coming hot on its
heels.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the front door. I couldn’t see who it was, but I knew it was someone trying to
sell us something. My wife got there first.
“Hi,” she said with a smile and a cheery voice.
I
couldn’t hear the door-knocker's pitch, but my wife said something
about camel crickets and how our house doesn't have a basement as she
stood over the threshold, holding the storm door open with the left side
of her body.
“Exterminator,” I thought. “No thanks.” Then I put the TV on mute, hoping I could hear more.
In
response, the door-knocker, who I now knew to be a young woman,
provided a canned response about the services her employer offered to
keep bugs, including camel crickets, out of our home. She had learned
her lines well.
Maintaining her smile, my wife said, “Sorry, we’re not interested,” and backed into the house.
I
was proud of her. My wife is too nice to tell salespeople to hit the
bricks, so she usually talks to them for way longer than necessary.
Thus, seeing her wrap this interaction up in a few minutes was
noteworthy.
If
it had been me who answered the door, I would have reminded the
intruder about the clearly visible “No Soliciting” sign, said “We’re not
interested,” and shut the door while the interloper was (likely) in
mid-sentence. Most of the time, I’m a mild-mannered, even-keeled, and polite person, but
there’s something about salespeople knocking on my door that makes me
irrationally angry and startlingly rude. In fact, I
was so mean to the last guy who came to the door, he slowly backed away
from me with his hands up. Surely, I'm going to hell.
My wife is not going to hell. She’s
genuinely warm and caring, always eager to help, and loves to talk. In
fact, when she goes to heaven, she’ll likely be the social chair a few
weeks after admittance.
I was waiting for her to turn around,
so I could congratulate her on ending the conversation in under 10
minutes, but just before she closed the door, I heard her say to the
door-knocker, “Do you go to the University of Kentucky? I recently took
my daughter to visit the campus. We liked it ….”
“Ugh. Here we go,” I mumbled. “We were so close!”
I
would later learn that the door knocker was wearing a University of Kentucky hat, that she
worked at the university last year, that she attended Binghamton
University, and that she was working in Maryland for the summer.
But
before that I learned all of that, and despite my annoyance, I marveled at how gracefully my wife navigated her
conversation with this young, door-knocking stranger who didn’t know
what “no solicitation” meant.
To an introvert like me, such
conversational ease is like a magical superpower. I have no idea how
it's even possible. I can issue a “Hi, how are you doing today?” well
enough, but things tend to fall apart pretty quickly afterward. How on
Earth do people keep small talk with strangers going?
Then,
just when I thought the interchange had reached its conclusion, my wife
asked the door-knocker if she wanted a
bottle of Gatorade Propel. I nearly fell off the couch. Not because the
Propel was mine (it wasn’t), but because I never
realized how different she and I were and how much of an ass I can be.
Here I am, an inch away from throwing boiling oil on these
door-knocking scoundrels, and here she is replenishing
their electrolytes.
"Man, I really need to be nicer to these
people,” I thought as I took the TV off mute. But in my heart, I knew
I'd get angry the next time someone knocked on the door.
____________________________
The Big Disappearance
Cousin
... to borrowing is theft, or rather a sister, and continual
companion, an assistant and a principal agent in procuring this mischief
as well they know who have custody of public libraries, and who have
for this reason to exercise so great a care of their charges, for, as
lsaac D’Israeli observes, great collections of books are subject to
other accidents besides damp, worms and rats, namely, borrowers, not to
say a word of the purloiners.
— "The Book Thief" from The Book about Books: The Anatomy of Bibliomania
Monday, June 8. It was well into the
afternoon and hot in Ravens Way. I was supposed to be working, but as
usual, I was interested in doing anything other than the job they pay me
for. Typically, at such points in the afternoon, I try to steal a little time
away from my desk by getting up to make coffee, but on this afternoon, I
was replaying the events of a dream I had the night before.
The
dream involved a tarantula my brother owned*, and according to the
nocturnal vision, I had travelled to his home in Buffalo to watch the
creature for the weekend. As the dream went, the spider seemed to like
me, for it took to sitting on top of my head. I had apparently gotten a
kick out of this, and I spent much of the dream trying to Facetime
(that's a verb now) my brother to show him what the tarantuala was
doing.
That's all I remember from the dream, but it was enough
for me to want to know more, so I turned to my collection of dream
dictionaries and a few symbol dictionaries to find out what dreaming of a
spider might mean.
That's when I noticed it was gone: Theresa
Cheung's Dream Dictionary from A to Z, the best of dream dictionaries in
my possession. While the others treat the symbology of dreams like
bothersome gnats that can be disposed of with a quick flick of an
answer, Cheung takes her subject seriously. She provides more nuanced
answers based on other elements of the vision, such as the dreamer's
attitude toward or reaction to the object, or the dream's atmospheric
elements. This, of course, is a long way of saying Cheung takes the time
to get it right, and her efforts, naturally, are what make her dream
dictionary the best.
Yet, as already mentioned, when I reached
for the volume in its usual spot on the short shelf by the wall, it
wasn't there. No problem, I thought. ("Stay calm, old boy!") I recalled
that, some weeks prior, I moved the dream dictionaries to a new location
on top of the shelving unit to make room for a speaker. Surely, it must
be there. I glanced up to the top of the shelf. Five dictionaries stood
at attention, but none was the book I wanted.
I returned my gaze
to the old spot. Perhaps the book had fallen behind the others, I
wondered. It hadn't. Maybe I relocated it to another shelf? I didn't.
Perhaps I found some room for it on one of the other shelves? I hadn't.
Maybe I did move it to the top of the shelving unit with the other
books, and it fell? Nope, it didn't. Perhaps it fell between the shelf
and the wall? (Now I was grasping at straws.) It hadn't.
For the record, I was aware that, as the reasons for the book's disappearance became darker and more sinister, they became less plausible. This awareness surprised me. In the past, when my reasons for something happening (or not happening) leaned toward the paranoid, I usually doubled down, throwing theories and accusations around like confetti until the evidence supporting a more rational and/or realistic theory became irrefutable. But not today. Today, let the record show that I stepped back from the edge and thought it through. "The book must be here," I said to myself. "I simply must not be seeing it."
And I wasn't. Returning my attention to the cluster of dream dictionaries on top of the shelf, I pulled out my desk chair and stood on it to survey the scene at eye level. That was when I saw it. The book, about a foot or so away from the others, had fallen behind some knickknacks, where it was somehow camouflaged in the clutter. Once discovered, I brought the book to my chest and let go a sigh of relief. Peace was restored, and no wild accusations or pointed fingers had to be retracted. It was the best of all possible outcomes.
Unfortunately, the book didn't have anything useful to say about the spider in my dream.
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Note:
* My brother does not own a tarantula.
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