Pillow Talk

Pillow Talk

Ooooo ... it's the dead of winter here in frosty Canada. Going out this morning was like venturing across the frozen tundra on one of those never-ending walks in the Arctic. I think there's some kind of parable regarding how Eskimos would walk into the freezing air until they dropped and died. Actually, I'm not sure if there really has ever been a parable about that. I may have just made it up. Still, if you went walking outside today, you wouldn't last long before you'd just be another frozen fillet in the cosmic freezer north of the Mason-Dixon line. Wait ... does the Mason-Dixon line run east to west or north to south? Arrrgh ... geometry was never my strong suit. Neither was geography ...

The smart person would stay indoors on days like this, but not me. I decided that I just had to go to Target and buy some new pillows. After all, they were on sale, and two of the pillows on my bed are like river boulders. If I happen to end up, in the tossing and turning I call sleep, lying on one of those sacks of concrete, I wake up with a sore ear and some subtle bruising on the side of my head. So, hopefully, I've corrected that little life problem.

The more that I think about it, pillows really are an important aspect of daily life. Some people know their pillows far better than they know anyone else in life. So, it's no wonder that most people have a favourite pillow, and God forbid, you should try to take it away from them. Stealing that "special" pillow from under someone's nocturnal head approximates kidnapping that sleepyhead's first born. You're sure to get a good kick in the ribs or regions thereabouts for being such a midnight scrounger.

Some people even go to great lengths to protect their pillows with a plastic covering and a delicately decorated pillow case. Not me. I should think putting plastic over a pillow somehow defeats the purpose of finding comfort there as you lie in bed after a hectic day. That plastic shielding is nothing more than an army issue condom dividing your expectant head from the pleasure of the softest, downy mound of sweet comfort.

Neither do I have a yen for decorated pillow cases. My pillow cases are always a solid colour, sometimes just bleach white. I once tried some patterned sheets and pillowcases, but I felt like there was some kind of psychedelic riot going on throughout the night. My kind of insomnia requires a certain amount of serenity, so I leave the purple haze or the hearts and flowers designs to the Ambien crowd.

Now, the pillows that I bought are designed especially for "side sleepers." It says so, right on the package. I thought that little piece of information was somewhat odd. I even looked for pillows for other kinds of sleepers, but I couldn't find any. I mean, what if you were an "on-your-back-sleeper" or a "tummy-sleeper?" Would these pillows suddenly be useless? Fortunately, I do sleep on my side, or more accurately, from side to side to side ... ad nauseum ...

Over time, I have also discovered that pillows have some kind of magic ingredient that makes them anywhere from "extra-firm" to "super-soft." I am a connoisseur of the in-between. Not too hard, and not too soft. It's a delicate balance, I know, but somewhere in that range is the perfect softness. I used to buy "extra-firm" pillows, based on the misconception that, over a few months, that extra-firmness would metamorphose into a sweet spot of some kind of luxurious and perfect submission of softness. I say this is a misconception, because from my experience, pillows go from one measure of bounce to no measure of bounce whatsoever. Pillows, it seems, have a life expectancy, and when they hear the death rattle of their "best-before" date, they just suddenly go as flat as a possum with a yen for moonlit hitch-hiking on some interstate highway.

Needless to say, there is a connection between pillows and making love. However, while rummaging through the bins of down and down-alternative headrests in Target, I quickly realised that there were no pillows specifically marked as love-making pillows. I'm not sure what kind of pillow you like when it comes to the gyrations of making love, nor do I really want to consider or imagine where you stick those pillows in the up-and-down rhapsody, but I know I like a pillow that is fairly firm. If I happen to be on the bottom of the dance, I like my head propped up somewhat. Why? Oh, I don't know. I guess that I like to watch. When you're on top, it hardly matters. You're just a sail up there trying to keep the boat steady and constantly struggling to ensure the mizzen mast is where it's supposed to be.

The more that I think about it, I guess the best pillow is a naturally soft D-cup or better. Maybe that's what I'm missing in my life these days and what's keeping me awake ...