More on Morning - Sleeping Waking Sleeping Waking
I wish I had some way to describe the gray zone - the quality of time that exists between when I finally decide to obey my alarm and when I emerge fully awake from the Broadway-Lafayette station. And yes, the quality of time is different - stickier, slower, divorced from the normal pace of action. . . My time in the shower - water so hot as to almost scald causing a form of automatic dance in the tub that somehow still does not manage to fully awaken me, but rather pulls me up through that fog to something closer to full consciousness, but mercifully just short of it - my time in the shower is its own pocket of time within this pocket of time - an encapsulated eternity, a journey of the body as much as it is one of the mind - though perhaps "journey" is the wrong word as that implies a destination - I wander motionlessly. In a way, I feel like I am still in that shower even though I am here writing this - in a way, I often feel that my whole day, these past eight years is/are just an imagining in the shower from right when I began my current job.
My current job is some kind of anomalous knot of time itself. I have sat here - not always "here," sometimes a different cubicle, facing a different direction - it has changed around me - people coming and going and going and going over the last closing in on nine years - the name of the very company I work for changing, being acquired, split off, sold - resigning and getting immediately rehired as a "consultant" - my role never changing - getting hired by the staffing company providing off-shore workers when individual contractors were banned by company policy - the people I work with, supervise, slowly trickling away through disgust and lay-off to be replaced by a growing group in India. Sometimes it seems like everything here happens in fast motion around me - I am as motionless as I am in the shower - not really motionless - but moving in infinite empty space so that all distances and relationships become meaningless.
How do I accomplish things in this sticky morning time? I throw out the garbage. I drop off my laundry. I walk up the three blocks to the elevated train and drop something off in the mailbox on the corner. I climb the steps two at a time, penned in on the left by a stream of too-loud high schoolers in their tight baggy jeans headphones crooked caps triple-fat goose denim jackets chuck taylor vans timberland do-rag studded belts kanye west sunglasses velour sweatsuits. In days of deep cold I hover by the heater flanking the bench in the station lobby underneath the window. I warm my hands and the warmth draws me back down deeper in the fog until the alarm of the arriving train draws me towards the surface again, up the steps to the platform to wind through the crowd to the rear of the platform to my accustomed spot in hopes of a seat and a free descent into that sleep I love. The only sleep better than my morning subway sleep is in the afternoon on the way home, because a seat is so unexpected that that sleep is even more so - sweet surprise and the crunch behind my eyes reminds me of the long days and nights of the mid-ninties, in school work band drunk stoned life sleeplessness.
I have often said that what I love about sleeping on the subway or on a long bus trip (such as the hour and half ride from New Paltz to New York, or four hours from Boston) is the ability to feel like I exist temporarily outside of time. I tend to dream in that time, fragments half-remembered and quickly forgotten by the time I emerge from underground or the bus slides out from the Lincoln Tunnel whisked away by daylight. But dreamtime is divorced from realtime - somewhere in between that imagined memory soup and the disconnect between consciousness in one place and regained consciousness so many miles away I can escape into a space occupied, according to Augustine, by God. I can imagine myself elbowing him out the way, or spooning up to Jesus and mumbling at the Holy Spirit - "Five more minutes, mom. . ."
I am probably not really really awake until somewhere just north of Bleeker on Lafayette when the sunlight comes streaming down the open streets in harsh angles making me squint to see the garish billboards setting high boundaries that reinforce another narrow arena in the cityscape. Sometimes I feel like I am surfacing and taking a deep breath before one last submersion, where the bright morning I have finally accepted as reality fragments and melts into dream forever.
My current job is some kind of anomalous knot of time itself. I have sat here - not always "here," sometimes a different cubicle, facing a different direction - it has changed around me - people coming and going and going and going over the last closing in on nine years - the name of the very company I work for changing, being acquired, split off, sold - resigning and getting immediately rehired as a "consultant" - my role never changing - getting hired by the staffing company providing off-shore workers when individual contractors were banned by company policy - the people I work with, supervise, slowly trickling away through disgust and lay-off to be replaced by a growing group in India. Sometimes it seems like everything here happens in fast motion around me - I am as motionless as I am in the shower - not really motionless - but moving in infinite empty space so that all distances and relationships become meaningless.
How do I accomplish things in this sticky morning time? I throw out the garbage. I drop off my laundry. I walk up the three blocks to the elevated train and drop something off in the mailbox on the corner. I climb the steps two at a time, penned in on the left by a stream of too-loud high schoolers in their tight baggy jeans headphones crooked caps triple-fat goose denim jackets chuck taylor vans timberland do-rag studded belts kanye west sunglasses velour sweatsuits. In days of deep cold I hover by the heater flanking the bench in the station lobby underneath the window. I warm my hands and the warmth draws me back down deeper in the fog until the alarm of the arriving train draws me towards the surface again, up the steps to the platform to wind through the crowd to the rear of the platform to my accustomed spot in hopes of a seat and a free descent into that sleep I love. The only sleep better than my morning subway sleep is in the afternoon on the way home, because a seat is so unexpected that that sleep is even more so - sweet surprise and the crunch behind my eyes reminds me of the long days and nights of the mid-ninties, in school work band drunk stoned life sleeplessness.
I have often said that what I love about sleeping on the subway or on a long bus trip (such as the hour and half ride from New Paltz to New York, or four hours from Boston) is the ability to feel like I exist temporarily outside of time. I tend to dream in that time, fragments half-remembered and quickly forgotten by the time I emerge from underground or the bus slides out from the Lincoln Tunnel whisked away by daylight. But dreamtime is divorced from realtime - somewhere in between that imagined memory soup and the disconnect between consciousness in one place and regained consciousness so many miles away I can escape into a space occupied, according to Augustine, by God. I can imagine myself elbowing him out the way, or spooning up to Jesus and mumbling at the Holy Spirit - "Five more minutes, mom. . ."
I am probably not really really awake until somewhere just north of Bleeker on Lafayette when the sunlight comes streaming down the open streets in harsh angles making me squint to see the garish billboards setting high boundaries that reinforce another narrow arena in the cityscape. Sometimes I feel like I am surfacing and taking a deep breath before one last submersion, where the bright morning I have finally accepted as reality fragments and melts into dream forever.