wake up song (in D: for Dog, did he begin to pray?)

This is one of two plus songs written by mistake/default around iphone wake-up tones. Y'know, you wake up at some godawful hour with that godwaffle loop in your ear and eventually you're going to make something of it. I mean...you'd hope, Godwaffles. You'd hope.

i'm'a throw down the gauntlet and call for an extrajudicial mefi music challenge here: you can't tell me you haven't built a song or two around your alarm sound. You haven't jammed with your wake-up buzz? Horse-shit!
Mindyou: I don't like the voice over, in performance and a bit in treatment. Please take me to school.

Here's how I do:

When you move house, you cast off old furniture and leave behind the well understood geometry of your living rooms, bedroom, kitchen, bath. But the paths you took through these environments are too well-worn in the mind to be deleted and over-written. Just as you know where your hands and feet are without having to look, so too do you build out the world around you by feel and routine, making maps you could almost follow with your eyes closed.

Even when you leave them behind, the maps stay etched on your nerve endings. Part of the known world. So even if you never return, you'll visit these old homes in dreams, along with the layouts of once local strip-malls or the labyrinthine hallways of your high school.

Maybe you don't visit them, so much as they visit you, as they seem to come at random, uninvited by meaningful recollection. You dream yourself struggling with some task or relationship that doesn't fit the setting. Arguing with a current coworker or making love to an ancient ex in anachronistic scenery. The scenario is patchwork, like the face of an unsolved rubric's cube.

Once you catch a hint of the dissonance, the distortions may grow like crystals on the walls of a cave. Soon the hallway closet door opens into an airport, or the woods behind your Aunt's house is filled with thick piles of laundry instead of foliage. Logic begins to skip like a stone and the narrative pace quickens. Even as your unconscious fights to make sense, you know you'll never get it back in order before you wake up.

We moved house last summer, slowly over the course of a month. Sold off furniture piece by piece in anticipation of switching coasts. This greatly upset the dog.

The geography of his home shifting daily: each time he came back from a long walk, you could see how he was struck by the growing bareness.
Imagine his mind as he crosses the threshhold, tired and happy and expecting familiarity, hard-won object permanence, greeted with the alien. Then, flooded with recent memories of the new tumult.

Consider the unfathomable anxiety that slowly permeated his doggy brain. His expectation at the door becoming guarded as the month wore on.
Did he begin to pray each time as I fumbled the key into the lock, begging the opening door to return his home? To set his world right again?
Wake up.

• play
• pause
• min volume
• max volume

posted by es_de_bah (1 comment total)

This is great. It makes me think of the way my house became somewhat of foreign territory when I came back home from surgery and had to sleep on the couch for the better part of 3 months. It was like making friends with—or in some cases, coming to resent—entirely new parts of the space. It reminds me of the winter I had terrible shoulder pain and spent a lot of time sleeping on the other couch, and how the light from the windows looked from across the room. I just recently returned to my book-lined bedroom and it's a much better space for sleeping, but all my dreams have been an unremembered jumble for the most part. It'll sort itself out...
posted by limeonaire at 4:35 PM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]