Night Thoughts
Sunday, July 10, 2022
For a long time, I went to bed early. It was like I couldn’t wait till the day ended, and I would embrace the darkness that came upon me as a blessing. I usually read in bed before I fall asleep, and I was reading “My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, ” which I think gave me an insane dream that night. There seemed to be a room in my house devoted to experiments—sort of between a science laboratory and a movie set, where everything was made of cheap cardboard. I was working in this area, realizing that maybe where I’m working does not exist. Yet, I kept working on an experiment that needed a great deal of electricity. But I couldn’t find a workable electric socket. Once I tried to plug in my machine, the socket would tear into two. The dream woke me up, and I had difficulty going back to sleep. Then in that natural state between wanting to sleep and not being able to sleep, I thought of girls. The one dream girl that I have always been infatuated with is the actress Sue Lyon.
Although I know she is in “Lolita,” I don’t think the fact that she is young made an erotic impression on me, but when she dressed up in costume, for instance, in her stage play in the film, I found her enticing. She wasn’t beautiful in that sense, but there was something nasty about how she looked in those scenes. I think it is her mouth that is sneering, which is the first thing on her face one notices, and then I slowly look up to the eyes, which confirm her sneer. I imagine being in bed with her and me on top of her, with that expression on her face looking at me. Face-to-face. A perfect life of sorts that is imagined, yet I was sleepless.
Foolishly, I turned on my reading light and returned to the Tesla book. I felt that there was only one lane on a highway; I was on that road, and one could only move forward. I was reading chapter five, “The Magnifying Transmitter, ” when I thought of the Telstar satellite. It successfully relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls, and fax images through space and gave us the first live transatlantic television feed—all in 1962, a period of brief optimism before the nightmare started. Nevertheless, something sad about the Telstar rotating around the earth (as of October 2013) and being dead.
The lightness of the Dawn sneaks in between the window curtain folds, and I curse myself for being unable to sleep. I got up and made myself a pot of coffee by pouring hot water over the grinder coffee beans and slowly watching the water disappear into the darkness. I imagine it looked like a landscape from a distant planet, and I wonder how I can turn my brain off. I looked at my calendar and realized that I better start writing my journal entry for today. I’m beginning to admit that I shouldn’t go to bed so early because I tend to wake up within three or four hours, and it is almost impossible for me to get back to sleep. I work by my turntable, and I put on a vintage vinyl copy of Ian Whitcomb’s “You Turn Me On, ” which is something I kept from my childhood. My father took me to see him at some club on the Sunset Strip, and he wore a lovely striped shirt that stayed with me for some reason. Non-sleep night brings up memories that are just not that important.