Wretched Hypnopompia
This morning I woke up with an angry welt on my left temple. I had a bad night’s sleep, that much is obvious. Which is odd as I’ve sleeping rather well lately.
Eris, on the other hand, sleeps poorly. Her snoring is like the rasp of the grim reaper as he inhales your dying breath. Sleep can be wretched in our bed.
And now, I have this welt and a jagged headache to boot.
I wondered for some torpid minutes about my dreams, but I couldn’t recall having dreamt again about falling through sharp crystals in the cold gloriole encrusted sky; or the one about swimming with large pelagic fish, none of them threatening, in the warm sargasso flow; nor was there the recurrence of the dream where I urinate off the edge of Uhuru Peak, only to find myself in bed in a puddle of my own urine — this dream recurs once every decade, and I now I certainly believe that I will drown sometime in the future in a pool of my own piss.
So I’m spending the hour before Eris wakes wondering about last night’s disturbing sleep, and about what awaits us all in the near future — it’s possibly nearer for me than her, but not too distant for any of us in any case. A pandemic? A war? The zombie apocalypse?
I still have some dozen colostomy bags the hospice nurse left here during mother’s decline — to that place where we dissipate before we disappear completely. I use these bags as disposable ice packs. I have one bound around my left temple now from the blow I took last night in my sleep. The headache won’t abate.
Anyway, here I sit unable to think or eat. I can’t eat because I’m having a colonoscopy later today and I’ve been ordered to fast. And I’ve been trying to write something reasonable in my journal, while my head pounds and my stomach groans. It’s damn near impossible.
My psychiatrist suggested that I keep this journal. I don’t think it helps much of anything. She plies me with pills to insure my level mood. She wants me within my “window of tolerance.” She says I have to be less intractable around others.
“If not an altogether more pleasant misanthrope?” I tell her.
But now I’m unable to write anything meaningful because Eris is half awake and wandering about the house. And this headache is cleaving my corpus callosum.
She’s now in the kitchen, filling yet another colostomy bag with ice. She’s complaining that her right wrist hurts and that her hand is swollen. She’s using the remaining gauze tape from the lancing of my thigh pustules to bind the colostomy ice bag to her knuckles.
Oh, what a wretched hypnopompia.
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal… it is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”
— Isabel Wilkerson / Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
thee istsfor manity reader 