What I Want

For a split second this afternoon, I had it. Pure bliss. Coming out of an inconsequential dream during a luxurious nap on this cool, great-sleeping-weather day, I told myself to wake up. Immediately upon waking I told myself to go back to sleep, but it was too late. But still, for that one second when I was conscious that I was asleep, I felt divine. Naps are one of the true pleasures of my life; unfortunately, I'm hardly ever awake enough to enjoy them, like I was for that split second today. It seems a cosmic joke that as wonderful as sleep--especially a mid-day nap--can be, you're rarely able to experience it fully, being asleep. So as I lay awake today, post-nap, basking in the glory of the memory that was that one-second conscious sleep, I thought, wouldn't it be great if you could bottle naps somehow, and imbibe them at will, while you were awake? Yeah, well, man-made flight, potato chips, and pantyhose were all once just crazy figments of somebody's delusional imagination. A man can dream when he's awake, you know.

Take it all around, I believe I'm a reasonably reasonable man, who doesn't crave much of what he can't have, but the mind does reel at times. That panicked, OMG I'm untethered in the universe feeling of tipping back too far in a chair? Wouldn't it be great if that feeling could be compacted into a stick of chewing gum, to be unleashed at will with every decisive chomp? Or the wheeeeee feeling in your innards when the down elevator accelerates too quickly and then stops abruptly? How about putting that in a discreet inhaler, to be hoofed whenever life gets a little too mundane? In my teens I skied a lot. I was never an elegant, parallel shush from side to side down the hill type, but I could hold my own on the rather tepid slopes Ohio's topography allowed. I loved racing down the hill knowing that I probably wouldn't fall, but also knowing that at any second a little mistake could send me sprawling. I did sprawl a few times, and always laughed my way giddy through the fall and for a minute or so after. Thrilling. Today I'd probably wrench a few muscles just getting the ski boots on and break a few bones getting on the chairlift. But man I'd pay a good price if that not-gonna-fall-maybe-might-just-fall feeling could be transformed somehow into hand lotion, or maybe an underarm roll-on thing. That moment just before a sneeze, when the whole world stops and concerns and obsessions vanish as your entire being is concentrated on just one thing--the sneeze? Put that feeling in a pair of socks, and I'll walk happily to the ends of the Earth. Really, aren't drugs and alcohol and all matter of obsessive diversions just pale attempts to recreate these everyday, ineffable, transcendent moments?

That awake-yet-still-asleep feeling, though--that is the best. It might take a face mask/gas mask apparatus to deliver that sensation, though. Get to it, inventors.