I say it's Paul Day. So first, hi Paul! that's my friend Paul. if he's reading this.
and for something a little less anticlimactic, check out Paul Pena, the greatest Cape Verdean r&b guitarist and self-taught Tuvan throat-singer from Hyannis, MA you never heard of, who wrote Steve Miller's heretofore unlistenably irritating hit "Jet Airliner" back in the 70's and has been toiling in obscurity since then, but just released an album, which is great, which i successfully hectored most of my male friends into buying. i mean, the guy needs a new pancreas, what was i supposed to do? he's also in the documentary film "Genghis Blues" that was nominated for an Oscar. in short, he rocks:
paulpena.com
finally, Paul Lukas is my hero. also i want his job:
inconspicuous consumption
and now i will wax about the nature of spring, sleep, and my long but pleasant night:
it's getting to be that time of the year where you don't sleep as much. are there wintertime insomniacs? i find that hard to imagine. just looking at my bed in the narcotizing half-light of yet another grey Boston afternoon between, oh, October and May, is enough to put me out. especially on a sunday, and if there's also something baking in the oven just forget it. even when i slept in an unheated room, where in the morning the wall over my head was cold enough to roll out pastry dough on, i slept like a hibernating bear. under several down duvets, in sweatpants, with flannel sheets - it was like a morphine IV. the seasons here in New England don't so much change as abruptly fling around a corner, much like our local motorists, so one day you're in your sixth month of sleepytime winter mode, and then BING! it gets up to 75 one afternoon, you open all the windows, watch the dust bunnies roll through the house, break a weak and annoying sweat. now it's time to sleep with the window open, and you get just warm enough to kick off the minimal spring blankets at 2 a.m., but then by 6 it's chilled back down and you yank them back up off the floor and over your head. you have to turn from a furry den beast into a tentative crocus, soaking up the sun all day and then shivering your leaves all night.
pretty soon it will be hot as all get out in the apartment, so hot you'll eat juice pops for dinner and crawl around on the floor, sit out on the porch until 11 watching the bats and wondering if you'd catch West Nile Virus from a mosquito if you slept out there, and you might, so you sleep the fretful summer halfsleep in your room, in between two or three whirring fans. or you did, until you got an air conditioner, which is great and all but you actually kind of miss the stickier nights, they are right out of childhood, no breeze and no dreams. well, ok, no, you don't really miss waking up testy and damp, utterly unrested. summer nights are hard on the body but push you to make very definitive decisions, such as "That's it! I can't sleep on this futon anymore! I am buying a real bed if it's the last thing I do!" ditto the night you jump up and vow to buy an air conditioner the very moment Bradlee's opens in the morning. you have spectacular arguments in the summer, and also periods of lethargy so intense that you forget to eat or answer the phone. sometimes summer is the moment you get your arms stuck over your head in a dress that doesn't fit; it presses on you.
but these spring evenings, the forty-degree temperature fluctuations between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., hearing the night out the open window again, and the birds in the dark. you wake up at 3, blocked and coughing from allergies, the invisible pollen falling over everything. one tiny cup of cough syrup resurrected from the cabinet, but it doesn't make you sleep, maybe the night's soft effect is stronger, and you sit propped up in bed with your new book for hours. hours! in the middle of the night! work tomorrow! all that! you listen to the presence of the air in and out the window screen, the thunk of a car door, stirrings in the grass, or maybe just the grass itself, carried up to your pillow on the fine new night. until the birds start up, it's quiet, but a fresh, enlivened quiet, after all the winter like cotton in your ears, and before the summer that drones. so you read and read, and listen, then find a cool pillow place and apparently sleep a little, because you're not tired at all today somehow.
when i was growing up in new jersey, i loathed the summer and didn't much like spring, either. there it's a long slow misty grade out of winter, with gentle rains and a muzzy heat that burns off into early summer by this time. easter can be a scorcher; after memorial day we wore shorts to our air-conditioned school. the summer is longer, hotter, and spring is just a light green harbinger of imminent unpleasantness. and yes, once i moved here i embraced the long chilly fall and even the truculent winters, mostly. but it's spring that draws you out of winter in new england, it appears one day and after a few weeks of tussling, it wins out! i never thought i would be so pleased, even relieved, to see that strange light green of new leaves, and be happy feeling the sun get bolder again. i guess the more frozen your marrow, the deeper your sleep, the better it feels to warm up, to wake.
hmmmm, it was also a Long Blog Day. you know you love it.
