Notices of spring are arriving in my email box. I am notified to wake up at 2:00 AM Sunday March 13th, 2011 and set my clocks one hour forward. I am glad all my clocks are smart enough to leap forward all on their own. Trick is, to fall asleep one hour earlier to accumulate by the new 6:00 AM eight hours of the dreamless. In an imaginary office in my imagined future, I see myself snoozing for twenty minutes on a post-modern couch, as Mad Man advertising executive Don Draper can. I request that my couch be delivered Monday morning. It's ironic, I have an office door I can close. If I took a nap there, news of my slackerhood would run around the entire headquarters. I can't have a neat glass of scotch with my meeting partners. I can't have a nice smoke to contemplate my strategy. Five decades later, and the office with the door has lost all of its accoutrements and privileges. I guess the next step is to work from home.
I can't even sleep overnight on the couch, as Congressman Peter Hoekstra once slept to save money when staying in Washington. I hear the museum in Holland picked this couch up for a grand or so; wonder if Pete can have it back when he finally lands the gubernatorial office, or maybe when he's tapped to be a Vice President?
I like a drowsy hour in office before my focus kicks in. The thoughts of a drowsy mind are different than the thoughts of a mind awake enough to run logic, write code, plan projects, read specifications, solve problems. I hear unheard music as I drift off and remember conversations never staged in the waking world, but it's a world I visit and leave only in the span of a power nod. I bring back bits and pieces.
Here's a fragment. I am on a playground, among swingsets and merry go rounds. Someone is muttering "Playground Issues, Playground Issues, Playground Issues", but this narrator is not visible and her voice is unfamiliar. Not a new playground with equipment composed of plastic towers, slides and playhouses. Not a community playground built of wood from the era when every municipality built one, fathers working together. My playground is one from my childhood, with jungle jims assembled out of metal pipe, swing sets with frames assembled out of metal pipe, slides with frames assembled out of metal pipe and slides fashioned out of polished and folded sheet metal. You'll be seeing these in collections soon, a kind of sculpture. I do not recognize a single person, but they all were children when I was a child, and even though all enjoy the equipment, none move with childlike energy. It's a very contemplative scene. In my left hand, I am carrying two copies of a street magazine, but it's not Metro Times from Detroit or even Muskegon's erstwhile Ill Times. I carry them as if they contained nuclear formulas, the cure to cancer or even a program of spiritual enlightenment. A man comes up to me, and he is smooth and speaks to me in a quiet voice, as if he worked as a counselor or a sales person. He is dressed in a silk shirt, the kind men wear when vacationing on Key West, untucked into his white jeans. I cannot make out his message, which I need to hear, but I am fearful enough to flee to consciousness. My first conscious thought, as I arise from my power nod, goes out to Debbie Ford, who lead a seminar in guided meditation at Renaissance Unity in 1999, and I attended, quite impressed. The meditation lead down into a cave, going down and down and down a mine shaft. In the mine cavern, oddly enough lit with a celestial light, we boarded a school bus and people would get out of their seat and talk to me. My power nod had gone Debbie Ford on me.
I am wide awake now, ready for the afternoon sprint when all tasks are complete and all problems resolved.
Even West Muskegon Advertising Executives fancy themselves Don Draper.
Pete couch-surfed in Washington.
The couch will go on display, but will the sleeping bag and pillow?
Pete's Couch is as famous at the Muskegon River turtle fence or Governor John Engler's Oldsmobile
Scott Sheldon sings the Turtle Fence Song as well as an encore. Sheldon informed me of turtle scaling the fence!
Debbie Ford, Dark Side of the Light Chasers author, and leader of guided meditation:
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