Sometimes you just have to put the world on hold to take a life impacting nap.

I didn’t know it was the greatest nap I’d ever take while it was happening, but that’s what it ended up being. My firework memory of it is a bit foggy and a lot awesome. I was lying in a hammock in a screened in porch (maybe it was an all seasons room? What’s the difference?) somewhere in the hills of Ohio, I think (is that even a thing?). I actually just went to the well, which means I Googled it, and it is a thing and now I’m thinking it was possibly Hocking Hills.

I was there, in both the location, wherever it was, and in the hammock with my girlfriend at the time (I originally wrote ex-girlfriend but for some reason that just felt a little weird to write, like she was just recently my girlfriend or something). I was probably 19 years oldish and we had decided to take a trip to see her Aunt (?) who lived in this hilly place and was an artist or some shit like that.

So off we went to spend the weekend at the artsy fartsy Aunt’s house. When we pulled in I kind of remember thinking we had arrived at some sort of commune, or maybe I mean compound. I think there were dogs just tied up outside walking around an area that they had clearly walked around frequently. The whole place took on kind of a Southwestern Navajo kind of vibe. In fact I think that’s the style of art the Aunt produced, like Indian type stuff or art that makes you think of Arizona. (My sophistication and memory of some of these moments is often outstanding.) The house was insanely remote, like I think the closest neighbors from any side were miles away, and I think that may be something the Aunt expressed almost immediately upon our arrival, which then made me question if I had been brought here to be murdered. Anyhow, it was extremely secluded.

I actually have extremely little recollection of the Aunt. No way I could pick her out of a lineup. I think I liked her but also recall finding her to be very cold, and somehow I think that chill was very squarely directed at men for some reason. We took a self guided tour around the home, which was interestingly amazing. It had this indoor pool connected to the house, which is weirder than it sounds, and it probably sounds pretty weird. There was this extension on the house that had this little pool, but when I say little I don’t mean too little, not like one of those swimming pools that is only like 8 feet long, but like a multi lane, probably 30 foot long and 15 foot wide, pool as I remember it. I think the girlfriend had mentioned the indoor pool when she was selling the idea of visiting to me. It was unique but it wasn’t the pool that made the impact, though I clearly recollect it as it isn’t too often, I don’t think, that someone has an indoor pool that you can actually confidently refer to as a pool, but it was the back of the house that was sort of jaw dropping. (Honestly since I’ve started to recall this memory I’ve found myself being highly curious about where we were exactly and where that house was. I also wonder why I don’t live there, and then I immediately remember it’s because it was in the middle of fucking nowhere.) The entire back of the house was windows, when I say entire I mean entire, there were multiple rooms along the back of the house as you can imagine, a great room, a bedroom, a little alcove room, probably some others I don’t remember. All of them had floor to ceiling windows, and out the windows was a sprawling view of whatever fuck mountains (probably hills) that were there. It was absolutely awesome.

The girlfriend and I would end up staying in that bedroom and it was crazy that the entire wall you were facing while in bed was a wall of windows. It was absolutely awesome (just realized I just said that like a sentence ago, but yeah, it was). And the house sort of grew into a peak at the back of the house from the sides, so this master bedroom’s wall of windows was like 25 feet high and probably at least as wide across.

You were definitely waking up when the sun came up. I think I recall there were some sort of crazy shades that covered the windows but honestly it’s hard to stop the sunrise over the hills (or mountains) when the entire wall is made of windows.

Despite all of this, crazy dogs, crazy man hating art Aunt, indoor pool, wall of windows, it’s the nap that I recall the most vividly. I always thought it was the hammock. To this day I’m an absolute sucker for a good hammock, and yes there’s a difference between good and bad hammocks. Dissecting it and looking back on it over the last few weeks I think I realize it wasn’t the hammock, at least not entirely, that caused this greatest of naps. And let me clarify a bit about what I mean there. You know when tv shows have that dream sequence, but a good dream sequence, where things are a bit hazy and totally lovely? Maybe a dream sequence that takes place on a beach or with a lover the character wants to get with, well that’s the best way I can explain it. When I woke up from it I realized that I wasn’t and hadn’t missed anything, I wasn’t late to anything, I didn’t have anything to do more so than I did before I fell asleep, which was pretty much nothing. It was quiet, but not too quiet, just stupid world making useless wasteful sounds not there quiet. There was still sound, but it was like the best nature sounds soundtrack you could imagine because there was nothing fabricated about it, there weren’t forced animal sounds or a gentle rain or some dumb shit like that, there was just the world as the world was intended sound. Then there was a breeze, but not a breeze (this is all starting to sound really stupid to me but literally no other way for me to explain it), more just a soft and slightly cool moving of air, that sounded as good as it felt. Don’t get me wrong, it still has a lot to do with hammock, the hammock was absolutely amazing, it was big enough to swallow you up like a cocoon, but not a cocoon that you can’t find your way out of and you look like an absolute jackass trying to unravel and free yourself from, but simple enclosure naturally around you. Also, the hammock material was brilliant, more like cotton than rope, but also true to being an actual strong and supportive hammock material.

So setting up that magical picture, I look back now and think that while the setting was somewhat ideal I think it was the fact that we had literally cut ourselves out of the world and pasted ourselves in this place, in the middle of fucking nowhere and yet everywhere, that contributed to this greatest of naps. Maybe it should be referred to more as a state of calm and peace as opposed to just being called a nap, but calling it the greatest nap ever is more fun and less smooshy. But seriously, this had to be around 1994-ish I want to say, and I think the girlfriend and I weren’t doing that great, and this was one of those serious high school sweetheart relationships, one of the ones where we’ll probably be together forever unless of course we aren’t really as mature as we think we are and maybe this is just a dipping of the toe into what serious relationships are like so that we can waste a few years really just learning more about ourselves so we can later have more amazing relationships that have now been better defined by what we’re really looking for, what we want in a partner, what we don’t want in a partner and what we like and dislike about ourselves. You all know what I’m talking about. So I think at this point we were starting to hit that, hmmm, maybe this isn’t all it’s cracked up to be stage, and decided to take a weekend away, away from what I’m not sure, but maybe we were going to find ourselves in each other. Anyhow, I think what turned out to be sort of the stopping of time and the process of cutting ourselves out of the world and pasting ourselves in this spot allowed the space to just be, to just literally be in the world. There weren’t any cell phones and the internet wasn’t constantly barking up your tree with an entire world of shit constantly at your fingertips and in your face. I realize I don’t have anything even remotely close to that at this point, and I appreciate I’m in a different place in life, but seriously, even through a pandemic in which we essentially have to cut ourselves out of the world there is still just too much world happening right in our fucking faces to cut away, or at least in mine I suppose. That wasn’t a nap checking out of life for 45 minutes or an hour, that was a nap checking into life.

I never made the connection before, and actually maybe there isn’t one, but when I feel I have to calm myself down or relax to try to convince myself to sleep or to quiet the anxiety that is sometimes (read all the time) running rampant in my head I put myself in a remote place that has this cool house that is very open to the world around it, and there is a beach and a lake and there are woods all around, and I hang out there in my head, and I like it. It is not so strangely, I guess, a lot like the scenario of the crazy art Aunt’s house, and I suppose the revelation of it to myself isn’t all that complicated, it’s the same shit we already know and that we’ve heard before in a bunch of different packages, take a time out, appreciate what’s around you, or maybe 20 some years later in an entirely different world, put yourself in a position to appreciate what’s not around you, no phones, no tablets, no screens (I also don’t recall a tv being in the mountain/hills house), no deadlines, no alarms, no manufactured bullshit noise, and then sit there in it, sit there in it until you find it comfortable, and then lay there in it if you want, lay there in it in a hammock if you want to, the great thing about it is that it doesn’t fucking matter, it’s your time, no interruptions, it’s your life, if you want take some time to have an outstanding nap that doesn’t make you simply feel rested for a bit, but one that reminds you that you’re alive in this world.