the Nixionary

I’ve written about this before, the strange thing that happens to me some mornings in Sitka. It only happens when Luke has already left in the rain. He says goodbye from the doorway where the water comes down like a curtain onto wet stones, and I fall back asleep. When I wake up, a few hours later, a massive weight glues me to the bed and I try over and over, side to side, headboard to footboard, to throw the anvil off my chest and come to sitting. Instead, I guess I fall back asleep and wake a few hours later, wondering if it was all a dream or some third state of uncertainty between asleep and awake.

Well, my friend Lauren just sent news.  The janitor at her school agreed that this feeling of suffocation is–as I had feared, and according to Mexican legend–the devil sitting on top of the one possessed. This scares the poop out of me because the man who confirmed my fears is a man of wisdom, according to Lauren, who knows history, religion, and myth, and who looks for the shimmer where others see the sludge. He collects any shard of gold glinting from anywhere in Denver–on the bus, on the curb, under a restaurant booth–brings his booty home, and melts it into jewelry for his wife. His cure for waking up under the weight of who-knows-what: two Hail Mary’s, which would imply that he believes one is, in fact, awake, during the sleep paralysis state, if they can muster two memorized prayers.

Lauren also prompted me to look into the definition for sleep paralysis, which seems to fit the symptoms I’ve had. From wikipedia: sleep paralysis occurs when the brain wakes from REM activity, but the body paralysis enacted during the dreaming state persists. While the brain dreams, the body supresses the physical actions which might accompany the thought progression of being asleep (your legs and arms don’t pump if you’re running in a dream, you don’t generally throw up in your bed if you’re throwing up in a dream).

Put simply: when REM is ON, your muscles are turned OFF. With sleep paralysis, it remains unknown why REM switches off–meaning consciousness prevails–and the body still sleeps. Or why somethings sometimes appear.

When this happens to me, all goes stiff but my eyes. I yank them from wall to wall, looking for a way out, and sometimes I see twisted images, contorted faces, or just the hovering essence of something horrible. I found that yes, eye movement, according to tests, is possible during such episodes and that “the paralysis state may be accompanied by terrifying hallucinations and an acute sense of danger. The hallucinatory element to sleep paralysis makes it even more likely that someone will interpret the experience as a dream, since completely fanciful, or dream-like, objects (often described as looking distinctly demonic by those who experience the paralysis) may appear in the room alongside one’s normal vision.”

This explains some things. The folklore surrounding sleep paralysis points to the darker side of the mystery. The stories range in narrative creativity, but not in root beliefs. In Nigerian lore: it’s known as “the devil on your back.” In Hmong culture: “dab tsog” or “crushing demon.” The Mexican belief: “subirse el muerto”–dead person on you. In Vietnamese: to be held down by a spirit, smushed by a shadow.

WebMD says not to be scared of night demons, to try antidepressants, or different positions while sleeping. Obviously, whoever wrote the sleep paralysis entry has never experienced it. First, you cannot convince yourself out of the fear that you can’t move and desperately need to get out of that room. Second, antidepressants aren’t good for people who aren’t depressed. Third, how do you try a different position if the condition’s number one symptom is that you can’t move?

I’m not sure what I think. Is “the dark presser” (the Turkish term) something worse than the body and the brain’s waking disagreement or is it just a physical fluke? I remembered recently, while telling Lauren about the bad mornings, that the man who used to sleep on the same bed as me also engraved all the headstones for the Sitka cemetery. We used to find cracked headstones in the yard when we looked for good grill grate props to use as hot beds for our peppered salmon.

Look up any ailment and it has its lore. Look up any folk story and it has more logical explanations. I remember a friend once saying that people who don’t believe are just as uncertain of their stance as those who do. Straying from science and math at an early age for literature and history, I realize certainty isn’t something I’ve ever pursued. Who knows what sometimes stops me from moving. My husband’s early mornings or the hangings-around of people who have only half-left the world. As the events in my life increase so does my stock in at least two beliefs:

1. From the smallest beauties (the perfect spores on the underside of the infinitesimal fragile fern) to the largest horrors (the dusted corpses of mothers holding their dead babies in Haiti), the natural and the supernatural coexist in all things.

2. Every quiet morning, my mom slides her small fingers over the 100-plus beads of the rosary, and I know–regardless of if I believe in the words or if sometimes I just believe in the comfort of my mom believing–that there’s no way it’s for nothing.

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I spent last Saturday shoving myself up a gradual incline on cross country skiis and then falling on my ass, wrists, and chest on the way back down. Now my knee and my ego hurt, and the impingement problem I’ve been having in my shoulder (which sounds whiny, since a person is only allowed one physical thing to complain about lest they be labeled a faker) has worsened.

A correction following a misconception: I did not quit my gig with The Denver Post. I resigned from the food magazine where I wrote boring articles in a basement. I spent today writing other articles, rubbing my deltoid, and talking to principals in front of a huge coffeeshop window until I got home and realized I didn’t have a key to my own house.

I wonder, as I enter a freelance “career”, peppered by part-time possibilities, what happened to the rags-to-riches myth we read about in high school English? If I were getting paid in rejections, I’d be making a good living. I have a hard time accepting that the Horatio Alger stories may have become one burnt-out version of American dream.

I consoled myself when I was working on my first essay for grad school that effort was everything, but I recently read this quote from Antonio Porchia, the Italian shortist and sweetist, and felt that it better qualifies the work of anyone trying today: “No one understands that you have given everything.  You must give more.”

It seems harder now to strike upon good luck (and by luck, I mean good fortune invited by concentrated effort) than it was for my parents’ generation. I’m working at a steady pace, but I feel like the guy on the treadmill tonight at the Wash Park gym whose ipod ripped off his arm, and whose legs got ripped right off the conveyor, too, when he turned around to look for his tunes.

Despite the fact that we’re trying to save money, Luke took me out to dinner for a pep talk. A woman with long gray hair pulled halfway back served us dinner in an underground pub where bottles of wine line the walls and caved candles flicker from every table. She called the hazelnut beer “lovely” and every one of her descriptions thereafter convinced me. I squeezed a lemon wedge over our raw oysters and then poured scotch over a basket of homemade chips.

I’m pitching articles left and right, and ideas come to me faster than I can query, but I’m only getting tiny bites, I lament to Luke over my creamy orange soup. Luke says that I have to have confidence in my product and that in this case, my product is everything I’ve ever experienced.

This is the other lesson I’ve learned so far in the last three days: do not underestimate what you’ll feel like after bad decisions. My shoulder hurts because I should have sat at a low chair, not the nice big table where I had a wobbly, white, and frothy chai tea this afternoon. The entrées (butternut squash bisque, toasted bread, and a burger covered in Stilton blue cheese) following the chai following the appetizers following the huge beers made me feel sick. I regret that I missed an important meeting last week because my keys were in Luke’s coat pocket. I regret the other things I think about when the Quincy and Luke’s heavy breaths fill the room.

When we got home tonight, I nurtured myself with a hot bath while Luke talked to our friend Jordan about the fishing moratorium they’ve scheduled for summer 2011 in Sitka. People who were boat owners in 2004 or 2005 in addition to 2008 will have their current permits transferred to next year based on how many days of fishing they’ve logged. But a lot of people will be cut out of the fishery, like Jordan, like Luke, who bought boats in ’08 and hadn’t logged any days in 2005. Unless we can pay for a permit someone else wants to sell.

In the tub, I put down Madeleine L’Engle’s journal on marriage that I’m reading (yes, THE Madeleine L’Engle of A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, who changed my childhood life and, as it turns out, is having some influence in my adulthood) to ponder this weird concept:

all the fish in the ocean are owned.

I can hear Jordan’s anxiety rising up and down in intonation through the phone in the other room and then I hear Luke joking to cheer him up. I’m a little worried about it, but I don’t understand fish talk so much, so I defer the anxiety and keep reading with my chin just barely dipping into the liquid. When I get out, I have a hot pink farmer’s tan around my upper arms and down near my ankles from the heat, but warm water always keeps its promises to me. My ski knee and tight shoulder are easy going for the time being.

“How much will it cost?” I ask Luke later about the permit I know he’s thinking about but not mentioning.

“Pfoof” is the sound he makes. “15 to 40.”

Thousand.

Luke is lying next to me in bed and pretending he’s dead. I wonder where we’ll be next year with these new developments in the fish world and the lack of work world. “Look,” Luke says, freezing his face with his eyes wide open and his mouth in a deranged grin. Then, without blinking or moving his mouth the slightest bit, he moves his eyes over to mine.

“I like being married to you,” he says.

We have a lot on our minds right now, but it’s true. I like it, too.

Tags: Day to Day2 Comments

I’ve been getting some flack for pieces in The Denver Post. And some good stuff.

Of note in my Nixionary inbox after my last few articles:

A single-sentence man writes: “You should learn how to fish.”

John tells me about the book he’s writing and the books his semi-famous southern son has already written.

A woman living in the Sangro de Cristo range without electricity was crumpling up newspapers to start a fire in her wood-burning stove and came across a few of my wrinkled ideas.

An email with no body. Subject read: “If you need extra income I have here some information that you might need.”

Another one: “If you look to the bottom of the real barrel, Ms. Nix, what you’ll see is yourself.” (Extra care taken to italicize).

An email from an old swim team friend I knew when we had hair on our legs and painted “Homestead” down our thighs in zinc oxide, who writes that she believes we can hold a lot of pain, but we have the capacity for just as much happiness.

An online comment from someone I know who says that “occasionally” my writing crosses the boundary from “stylistic to sappy.”

Yeah. Well …

I’ve tried to respond to all of the emails that were reasonably written. My mom and I took a walk tonight towards the jagged black silhouette of the mountains and talked about how people never seem to know what they (themselves) sound like. I took a long bath and let the conditioner sit in my hair for half an hour and that felt like I was doing something with definite results.

Now I’m sitting here in my thick white bath robe with the tips of my hair dripping Pantene Pro-V Intense Conditioner down my neck. Somewhere between July and now, the ugly-mean emails have begun to matter less and the good ones have begun to matter more. I wonder if I only want to be conditioned with goodness once it comes time for public judgment, and if so, does that make me a self-absorbed writer, or just a realistic one?

I’m reading Volume One of The Paris Review Interviews, and up pops this part from an interview with Truman Capote who calls the interviewer “girl,” and says things like “Heavens,” God love him.

Of note here–

Interviewer: Do you think criticism helps any?

Capote: After something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore, and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you produced a writer who can honestly say he was ever helped by pissy carpings and condescensions of reviewers. I don’t mean to say that none of the professional critics are worth paying attention to–but few good ones review on a regular basis. Most of all, I believe in hardening yourself against opinion.

I believe in it, too, but believing and being love to play opposites. For me, hardening is harder than softening. The sappy comment really stung and I’ve been trying to wash it out of everything I’ve ever written. I know, that despite (and maybe even because of) my efforts, it’s staying put. Sap’s in me. And it’s sticky.

Tags: Day to Day32 Comments

Being Married. It’s a subtle change. Like getting a haircut and forgetting you look a little different until you glimpse a glance of your new look swishing past in a mirror, and you feel a little ping of excitement at the new you. Since I’ve felt my whole life that I was made to share it with someone, living a half-shared life feels pretty natural to me. Luke scoots around on his hands and knees sliding dog hair out from alongside the baseboards while I pour hot water into the French press and my tall teacup. I look at him and I feel lucky, so I say to him, “When I look at you, I feel lucky.” He calls me his wife, and that’s still a little wierd.

Boxes are stacked in every doorway and on every flat surface—serving bowls and silverware, salad bowls and wine glasses, towels and trinkets—the things you receive when you have a wedding. My parents brought us a basket of booty they’ve been collecting for months—books on cooking fish, seafood platters, placemats, a little treasure of a letter stuck between sets of chopsticks. Luke’s parents and brothers handed pizza around the room and tore shiny ribbons away from three-by-three foot packages while we read little notes from our friends like Dr. Savory (a dentist) who wrote that “every good relationship has its foundation in proper oral hygiene,” and whose daughter reminded us that “the key to a good life is a leisurely breakfast.”

This morning, our little house has the feel of leftover Christmas with its shredded paper and sharp edges as I shuffle my way to the back door to let out Quincy and Wyatt, the new dog we can’t decide if we’re going to keep. He’s somewhere around 10 months old, a border collie/Australian Shepherd mix, with white fur, big brown spots, and eyes a cornflower, crystal blue. He’s not a bad dog, just a new thing, and I think I’m hesitant about him because I just want the peace of mind to enjoy things like my new husband and our nice knife set and the books and books that have been waiting for me for the last eleven months.

This morning the snow is eight inches deep when both dogs highstep into the stuff, and I don’t realize as I hold out my palm to catch a few flakes spinning down that the gate is open out to the street. Wyatt, a low-scurrying cattle dog who doesn’t have the speed of walking built into his genes, bounces out past the chain link fence, and stops to look at me like he’s waiting for some direction. Come here, I say, and he stays. You better live up to your name, I tell him, then he pushes up some snow with his nose, and comes trotting back.

I can sense he’ll be loyal if we just let him, and he’ll stop peeing in the corner behind the yellow chair if we have the patience to teach him. Most of the time I feel like I do until he gets muddy and puts his paws on my clean jeans and then I feel like he’s ruining my life. When I lay on the couch with a book, he points his bright blue eyes up at me with a look that says please keep me, and he sleeps under the bed with his nose sticking out, which makes my heart hurt a little, so I guess we probably will.

We took both dogs to the park yesterday and sprinted around in the falling snow. Wyatt is so excited to not be at the pound, he can’t help himself but pull so hard he starts hacking up. Poor Quincy has a little extra padding around his orange hips and huffs and puffs the whole way, lagging like an old emphysemic man even though he’s only six. There are so many perfect people in this neighborhood with their perfect dogs, sleek black labs and shiny golden retrievers, who leave slack on the leash and heel when that weird command is called. Wyatt fits in our hodgepodge house stocked with wild game and Byzantine icons and salvaged goods, and he reminds me, when we let him off leash and he’s so excited that his legs slip out from under him as we’re crossing the street, that life is inclined towards the unwieldy, not the ordered.

Mostly I’m leaning towards keeping Wyatt because when we saw him at the pound, Luke, who longs for space in the same way as this silly little dog, said, “I’ve been waiting to have someone like him my whole life,” and I know how that feels.

Tags: Day to Day2 Comments

I haven’t known what to write lately because I’ve been stressed and I think stress shakes up the brain like a long run. I never run very far, but I’m in my own kind of marathon between school and work and wedding and this week feels like mile 22.

Most marathon runners don’t train beyond the mileage of my lucky number. If you run further than the 22nd mile during training, veteran marathoners say you’ll dread the actual race. You won’t believe you can actually make it 26 miles if you train for 26 miles. The training run will hurt way worse than the real race which brings the greetings of adrenaline and momentum and, maybe most importantly, witnesses.

I was one this weekend for Pizzo’s first marathon. I rode a turquoise bike with a hard seat while she chugged up 7th, down Downing, around Wash Park, across Logan, and straight on to Civic Center Park Sunday morning. Sometimes, mostly on the uphill parts, she stayed pretty quiet, which is when I talked about candy, shoes, and how great she was doing.

“I hurt all over,” she said at one point, while we bumped across the uneven pavement on Speer. We were in front of my old apartment and I missed the way the sun came in over the golf course and through the wrought iron window frames. I like marathons because you cover a whole town in a single morning, slowly enough to remember the parts of your life that have happened on those same corners. Marathons, when I watch them, make me think of my best friends who have done them in different cities, and as sentimental as it sounds, long distance races make me proud of human beings.

I think part of what makes people run is you think in a different way when you’re willing yourself through your body’s physical resistance. The snow looked wet on the sloped side of Mt. Evans and the trees blinked red and silver in the sun, but Wash Park didn’t really feel like Wash Park, Denver wasn’t really the same workday Denver. Races can make you hate or love a place, but for me, they always make me see that space like it’s being poured out, layer by layer, and you’re stepping into each memory or sidewalk or streetcorner with an awareness of those past miles and how your mentality will effect the present ones.

I asked Peez where her favorite place in the world is, and she said a cavern off the side of the Grand Canyon that looks a like  rainforest in the middle of a red desert. I thought about my favorite places. A gelato place in Trastevere. The blue and yellow, chipped mosaic table Kate and Ashley and I used to sit at on the corner of my porch in New Orleans. My parents’ kitchen when it’s early and the Sunday paper is still one unruffled chunk on the counter. Groups of men turned around with their mouths open and congratulated Sarah when we passed them, me on my bike, cheating and thinking, and she in her day-glo gear.

At Mile 22, Peez looked a little white and unsure when she looked over at me and said, “I’ve never felt like this before.”

Teenie, who had joined us, said that at the worst point during one marathon, her sister asked another runner, “How many miles are in a marathon?” and the other runner replied, “Shoot. I don’t know. 22? 23? I really have no idea.”

How do you explain that?

Mile 22 also presents to the hopeless runner a catch-22. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you stop running, it will all be for nothing; if you keep going, each step means more pain. Joseph Heller’s book, Catch 22, where the term came from, was a book I didn’t totally get when I read it in high school. I remember Major Major Major Major and little else. I felt like I was in a catch-22 when I was reading that book. Keep reading and I will be more bored and lost; stop reading and I might never understand. In Catch 22, the catch-22 is when a paradox in rules makes a character a victim, but they can’t do anything about it. What if you put yourself in that helpless position, regardless of definitive rules? Is it still a catch 22? And is there really such a thing as a catch-22 if everyone either quits or keeps going? I’ve had a lot of 22nd miles, but no true catch-22s; I grew up with a mother who taught me that hope will always push you out from between the rock and the hard place.

My favorite number is 22 because a girl I used to dance with named Emily opened my eyes to all the 22’s in the world. “Once you start to look for it, you’ll find 22’s everywhere,” she said. Emily’s dad died when we were young, and she kept a t-shirt and a tiny black comb that smelled like him under her pillow. Her mom had a mini grocery cart that held their apples and bananas near the kitchen sink, and we used to swing from a knotted rope into the Highline Canal behind her house after Saturday dance practice when the summers brought enough rain to fill the channel to its grassy banks.

Because of Emily, I learned about cherishing objects and numbers and people. I did start to see 22’s everywhere. I was assigned number 22 for soccer. Cars in front of me had a 22 on them more often than not. I could convince myself I’d see a 22 in the next 22 minutes and I would—on the front of a house, on a sheet of wayward paper, on a digital clock. I even turned 22 once. That year, the year Katrina hit, felt like a much worse 22nd mile than the one I’m at right now. “I’ve never felt like this before” is the only way I might have put it.

I don’t remember moving  a single thing into our house in the Garden District with the dusty camping chairs and the pigeons that roosted on top of the pillars. I don’t even remember the drive back to the city after the hurricane. I wonder what it is about stress that makes us lose our memories. Sometimes I feel like I’m running after the blurry snippets of my past all day and all night in a race I’ll never finish.

People who run marathons don’t finish single trains of thought, prayers slip into daydreams, and songs become single line mantras. I’d like to do a test on marathoners and talk to them at 22 and see what they remembered. What does the brain do during all those grueling, stretched out minutes? Does it go quickly or slowly? If I can remember all the songs on my Mariah Carey tape from 8th grade, shouldn’t I remember my more current, maybe more important footfalls?

The memory is like a choosy little person with tight fists. Sometimes you can get her to open her hands, but only when you catch her unawares. I know my own memory doesn’t remember myself as well as others, but I’m glad. I love the snapshot insights that stick with me from all my favorite people. And if you gave me a choice, I’d rather be the witness than the runner.

Just after the 22nd marker, Sarah said, “Well. I have about a 5k left. I can do that.”

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