(no subject)

[raybear]

Sometimes when I'm walking through the apartment late at night with all the lights off and my laptop in hand, I will open it and face it outwards and pretend I'm in some Discovery Channel show using a night-vision camera to investigate a haunted house. And then I freak myself out and shut the laptop really fast.

I have not showered since Sunday. I have, however, taken 3 baths. That is not my usual proportion of things, and I feel a bit indulgent using so much water.

Today has been filled with surreal daydreams, intensified by an afternoon nap and quasi-lucid dreaming involving a familiar stranger and an old friend and a home and a passionate affair, those dreams that bring bliss in quantities dreams usually reserve for terror and panic. It was so hard to wake up, even more so because, really, I had nothing to wake up for, I had the day to myself and could sleep it away if it brought me pleasure, but it seemed like a bad sign, the symptom of depression, and I got ticked off that I ended my reverie because of medication commercial warning signs blaring through my head. So I've poked around the rest of the day, enjoying myself still almost because of the longing and the occasional moment of closing my eyes and slipping back into the sensations of that otherworld, remembering minute details likes the fabric on the couch, the smell of the room, and focusing to make out the details of faces. I am horrible with faces of real-life people, I can often remember names and conversations and hair and outfit and the circle of the face is a flesh-colored blur, like an anonymous whistleblower being interviewed on the news. However, this time I could do it with such perfect clarity, I felt almost the pleasure a sculptor might, in so perfectly capturing the proportions of a face that you can run your (imaginary) hand over and around and feel your success. Keep touching and get hairs tangled up between your fingers, its quite real, for a split second, before I nod off and muscles jerk, splashing the bathwater and waking me up from not-quite-asleep. I close my eyes and do it again.

Synthetic happiness is possibly superior to so-called natural spontaneous happiness, its longer lasting, so perhaps this moment in the tub of remembering a memory of an imaginary event serves an even better purpose than 'authentic nostalgia'. The imaginary sort of longing in stories can be worked and worked and worked over until a proper resolution is found.

Comments

[tracijean.livejournal.com]

that haunted house/laptop thing is so totally something i would do. i get so unnecessarily sketched out by those shows!

[anjiyama.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed this post, your ruminating. I've been sleeping a lot this week and these afternoon naps have a kind of energy that nighttime dreams do not as consistently, an intensity of feeling involved. Or maybe it is the waking up without having to jump to the events of the day, the time to think about what just happened and even slip back into it if you want to.

It's been a week of lovely naps. When Matthew, Chloe Drew and I lived in Casa Hoyt in Portland there would be naptimes in the afternoons when Chloe was at work and the boys and I would go to our rooms and sleep, waking up to smoke and visit on the porch hours later.

[mintwaster.livejournal.com]

Sometimes at night, I turn on my iPhone to light my way from the bathroom to the bedroom and I imagine the same thing and that I'll shine it and someone will be standing right there.

[raybear.livejournal.com]

I scared myself because I was thinking of how I might come upon Sophie unexpectedly in my beam and she would look all freaky and demon-like.

[sorting-laundry.livejournal.com]

I have problems with faces, too. Because of it, I often assume that other people do, as well, and I'm always surprised when new acquaintances recognize me later.