Monday, May 21, 2007
Manly Rant: Feather-Bested
I’m probably a spoiled whiner, but those goddamn feathers are driving me batty. My wife doesn’t care, so I’m going to complain at you, blogsylvania. You probably don’t care either, but sometimes a man has got to vent his batting.
Maybe I’m just a little princess - too highborne and refined to endure substandard luxuries. Then again, I’ve put up with some awfully crude accommodations in my day. I guess it’s a late-onset condition: “type 2 princessitis,” if you will. And if you won’t, I will. I’m a goddamn princess and I reserve the right to bitch. And so:
The bed, it is adequately comfortable. I wouldn’t go for another pillowtop again but one lives and one learns. The memory foam mattress topper is getting a little tired but remains serviceable nonetheless. The sheets, I hardly notice - a sufficient endorsement under the circumstances. Of course, there’s the blanket: a heavy length of soft wool, kind to the skin and thermally retentive. Sure, it’s meant for a narrower crib than my king-sized set-up, but I don’t need it dangling off the sides anyway; it fits neatly across the top of the bed and covers every place I might think to repose myself therein, and that’s plenty good enough for me.
And then there’s the comforter. And I realize that this is going to sound picayune to some people but I have got to get this off my chest: those goddamn featherprickers are making me nuts.
It’s a nice big comforter that drapes generously over both sides of the bed, dusty green on one side and olive on the other - two subtle, soothing hues. It’s deeply battened into large rectangles, and absolutely loaded with high-loft down. But let me ask you: is down supposed to have all those blasted stickernubs? Or am I dealing with a defect in the feathers? In the fabric of the comforter? Or is it, in fact, a problem with the very fabric of the universe itself?
Or is it me?
It’s probably me. It goes like this:
I get into bed and roll naturally into my preferred somnolent positioning, carefully pulling the sheet and blanket to the appropriate clavicular height, ensuring that they’re taut and unwrinkled - not unlike myself. I give the comforter a final adjustment, smoothing it with my drowsy palms - and as I complete my final pass, I feel a tiny wiry protrusion drag beneath my hand. I search for it with my fingertips, with both hands; I sit up and look for it, disturbing my carefully arranged linens, but I see nothing. I throw myself back into the sheets knowing only too well already the circumstances under which I’ll find it again.
Late, late at night - very early in the pre-dawn morning - I turn in my sleep and sense wrongness in the universe. Something is calling me back to the world of the wakeful, and it’s my own blasted bedding. My hand has fallen outside the covers; where it rests on the comforter, a tiny needling prods my flesh. In the darkness, with my eyes closed, it feels quite significant, but as my fingers begin to stumble, seeking the source of my irritation, I already know it’s objectively tiny.
Most times I can’t even find it as I pinch at the fabric and run my fingertips along the soft cotton, hoping I’ll rediscover what’s awakened me: the butt-end of a small feather, sharper than envy, that’s just peeked far enough out of the comforter to catch my attention. The longer I search for it, the more awake I become, till I’m sitting up and flailing at the puffy covers with both hands. When I re-discover it, or another one like it (by this point, any feather will satisfy me), it usually takes me a few tries to catch the tiny tip of the shaft of the feather between my thumb and forefinger; sometimes I need to catch it from under the fabric and work it out a little farther before extraction can be successfully achieved. But I achieve extraction of that malicious, malignant feathery fiend, one way or another. You can count on that.
So there I lie, wakeful and triumphant, a hair-thin feathershaft in one hand, strumming its rapier tip with one finger of the other. The whole thing is only an inch long, if not less. Even in the magnifying darkness I am shamed that I’ve let such a tiny mote get the better of me. I let it fall to the bedside floor, where, as expected, it lands silently, giving me no satisfaction in my disposal of it. It just goes away as if it never existed, and it takes me a while to fall back to sleep.
The next morning I gather from the hardwood the evidence of my trial by feather, and proudly display it to Kelly. “See?,” I tell her. “I pulled it from the comforter! It woke me up!” She scoffs and returns to her morning, as careless of the feather as she’d been the night before. It didn’t wake her up from her sleep; why should it slow her down in the daytime? And more to the point, why the hell am I such a pansy about it?
I think it’s time I grew a thicker skin, or just became a bigger man. I shouldn’t let a tiny fluffy feather ruin my nights like this. I hope it happens soon. Kel’s perfectly happy with the comforter and we’re not getting a new one in the foreseeable future. It’s up to me to be the master of my feathery domain. Some things a man has got to do for himself.
