2010-09-21 - 11:49 p.m.
My dad told me once the trick he uses to try to fall asleep when he can't. He said he goes over an elaborate process, step by step. He'll load a muzzleloader, or choose a lineup from an old baseball team he coached, or make a pot of chili. For me, it's moments of triumph. There's a particular baseball game, from when I was a senior in high school, that sometimes works. I remember each of my three at-bats, the first single up the middle, then the line drive between the shortstop and the third baseman, and then the long fly over the left fielder's head that hit the fence on a hop. Sometimes I imagine I'm playing in the World Cup, that I'm running hard down the center of the field, like Maradona, eluding dudes before I fire off a shot.
Sometimes I fly. I imagine standing on top of the warehouse building where I used to live, from where many good memories live, and I'm at the edge, four stories up. I have wings, but the wings don't belong to me. I've made them, and they're like hang-gliding wings, and when I jump the wings somehow click together, at the middle of my back, and they're stable. I fly over that rotten neighborhood, and then west over Mount Vernon, and then south, toward the harbor. But things always get fuzzy. Do I tilt in order to turn, or do I use some kind of joystick? It's like imagining sex that has never happened. You want to get each step right, cement it in your head, nail it down. You can't skip ahead because skipping ahead--to the nakedness or to the swooping east over Fells Point--cuts out the vital in-between stuff, the how-you-got-there, and the in-between stuff is what makes it real. You can't get to nakedness if there's no soft, warm talking, no light falling on the bed, no vital touching. The touching is vital like the exact makeup of the wings is vital.
And so I muddle through the best I can, trying here to fall asleep on a September night, remembering certain specifics, trying desperately to make up certain others so that it feels right, so that it feels as if all the vital cogs are in place and turning, so that it feels at all.
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