August 22, 2002

• I got out of bed this morning to blog about how much I love being in bed.  Well, okay, that’s not strictly true.  I partly got out of bed because I thought I had to go to the outhouse, but it was a false alarm.  As a rule, I only get out of bed when I sort of have to–like when I sort of have to go to work, or tend to a bodily function I don’t want to be functioning in bed.

  
  

  And to be really strictly true, what I call bed is not what many people would consider to be a proper specimen of the set of bed-like objects.  I sleep on this folding cot made of aluminum tubing and nylon canvas.  The tubing is broken, the result of an awkward landing one night to avoid squashing a cat who had pre-empted my space, and is propped up on a piece of lichenaceous firewood to keep the whole shebang from collapsing.  Soft is provided by a piece of old sofa cushioning, which is maybe two-thirds as long as I am.  I sleep in an old Coleman sleeping bag.  The whole works sort of crackles sometimes, due to the newspapers between sleeping bag and cot, which are there because the ceiling leaks right above the place my feet go.

  
  

  Other than that, and the soft whisper of the box fan which keeps air circulating in the winter when most all the windows are sealed up, it is totally quiet.  There’s the occasional gunshot–this is Alaska, after all–but there is virtually no traffic noise, no sirens (think about that–how often do you hear sirens?  We might hear a siren once a month, if that.), no street noise.  It is peaceful.  And comfy.  I haven’t mentioned the posh part of my bed, a new feather pillow that I can scrunch and pummel to my little heart’s content.

  
  

  Being in bed is particularly interesting due to Muffin, cute and chubby tabbycat who has bonded with me.  When I am ready to go down, I get settled down in bed, get my t-shirt wrapped around my head to keep out excess light, and get the pillow arranged.  Then Muffin comes padding up in the semi-dark and picks a  comfy spot om me to curl up on.  She is quite tolerant –when I have to get up to take a leak or something, she gets off, waits patiently unto the commotion stops, and hops back up.  There is something amazingly comforting about having a cat sleeping on you.

  
  

  Once settled in for sleep, the best part of sleeping is dreaming.  I have very vivid and bizarre dreams, some of which are lucid which is really a lot of fun.  I often wake up in the wee smalls with fibromyalgia pain or something, and I just enjoy lying there, listening to the quiet, thinking about what I have to do the following day.

  
  

  In winter, the best part of being in bed is being warm.  We have a woodstove in the living room, an oil burner in the back of the trailer, and a few ceramic heaters placed startegically here and there, but the place never really gets warm when it is , say, 30 degrees below zero outside.  As a rule, the only time in winter I am really warm is when I am in bed, or working outside and thanks to my hernia, I don’t do much if any work outside any more.  Sometimes in winter, I spend over 12 hours a day in bed.  As a Libra, the symmetry pleases me–in the summer, I spend 12 or more hours a day working.  Winter is for sleeping and reading and doing crossword puzzles and being nostalgic for summer.

  
  

  We have a lot of fun making up names for our nutty seasons.  We don’t have spring, we have breakup.  We don’t have autumn to speak up, summer just sort of quantum leaps into winter.  Lacking hardwoods, we don’t have much in the way of gawkable fall foliage.  Someone once told me that on the previous year, he got drunk and missed summer.  Someone else said we have teo seasons, road construction and winter.  The most bleak, and arguably most accurate, summary was this:  we have two seasons–Winter’s Coming, and Winter’s Here.

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