MMM

Every once in a while you have those mornings where you awake, and you have lost all sense of temporal and spacial perspective. This is all the more exacerbated if your sleep is less than at its deepest. This is kind of ironic – one would think that the deeper the sleep, the deeper the immersion into that false reality we call the dream world. As anyone who has ever slept with/near me knows, I am an incredibly light sleeper. A fucking baby batting an eyelash two buildings away will tear me out of the most fathomless drunken passout. Ok, a slight hyperbole there. But I am a light sleeper.
Now, anyone in NYC this morning must have noticed, and been awoken by, the apocalypse-sounding thunderstorm. I never read the weather reports (I'm from L.A…) so it sure as hell came as a surprise to me. Now somewhere in my formative years I had instilled in me the fear of the apocalypse (I wonder where…). But it occurred when I was young so I can't really break the fear, no matter how much logic I throw at it. This is not a conscious fear. I am not afraid of the apocalypse, rapture, armageddon... But I have these near-subconscious moments where that fear bubbles up to the surface. This morning was one of those rare times, but I was surprised to find myself greeting my impeding doom with more of an air of annoyance than mortal terror.
Really the only time I believe in apocalypse is in the middle of the night, when I am awoken by something loud. I remember living in Rochester during my senior year of college - this was just after 9/11 – and in my new apartment at East End, right next to the famous Hotel Cadillac, being startled awake by inhuman sounds like the clash of immortality just outside my window. Caia would always tease me about shooting up in bed and exclaiming, "Shit's going down!". This happened several different times.
The reality was that it was the police and fire dept screeching their sirens and blasting their horns as loud as they could at 4:30 in the morning in an overeager response to some ghetto shit at the Hotel Caddy. Dead prostitute, overdose, malicious case of AIDS… oh wait, that was in my building (seriously…).
Oddly enough, the depressing reality of the actual reason for the cacophony never kept me up at all. I could sleep like a baby knowing that messed up stuff was going on, it was the fantasy world that frightened me.
So this morning was a turning point in a way. I was up late working on a track, and spent most of the night thinking about the track, so I had only been asleep an hour or two when the (apparent) apocalypse hit. What is funny in retrospect was my reaction. It went something like this:

"Wha-what the hell is that?? Shit, that is really fucking loud! The end of the world? Goddamn it, I just fell asleep!"

For real. My clearest emotion was a type of sulking anger that I had just spent several hours lying in bed trying to sleep, and now it was the apocalypse, thus ensuring that I would not in any circumstances be getting enough sleep for the night.
Is this me letting go of the fear, or just me turning into a bitter, young curmudgeon?
It reminds me of Marv's final scene in Sin City. While strapped into the electric chair, he is being read his list of crimes. Interrupting the guard, he growls,

"Hurry up, I haven't got all night!"