Sound Words: Does Not Sleep On Mac Demarco's Salad Days
“Waking woozily somewhere wholly foreign”
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I would never make claims to being narcoleptic, but I have definitely fallen asleep in public places enough times to raise some questions. I'm not talking about drifting off in the back seat here, head occasionally spiking into consciousness when a road jolt twinges up the neck, twisting like a hammered note.
Nor do I mean the quiet serenity found in the enveloping tangles of a hammock. Slung between two trees: shadows dancing like off-echoed feedback, notes tracing each other in hair-split fractions of seconds, as time trickles across the hour of siesta, condensation forming on the outside of the bottle.
No, not these semi-private sleeps, the sort of unplanned passing out that happens on a couch after a satisfying meal beefs up inside of you, expanding like organ chords, swelling in the sweet beam of sunlight that filters through the windows, as whatever drivel playing over the TV screen zonks out your mind.
I'm talking about adventure-variety sleeping, naps that laze their way into your periphery at hour two of the float downriver. When the water has started to thicken, widening eddies slowly spinning the raft, the river's hands noodling as it plays its sweet chorus of ebb and recede, of drifting reeds and sun-spattered smooth stone shoals coming up to kiss your trailing fingers.
Waking up from the deep 3 PM crash with the sun still up and struggling to believe that you haven't slept away an entire day . . . the transport of dreams that are just the dappled shifting sway of light playing over your eyelids.
How once, having hiked halfway across San Francisco, my girlfriend and I feel asleep in the middle of Crissy Field, the foot-tall grass buzzing around us, the pale dew butterflies patting down between us as we dozed. How safe I felt despite every metric of reasoning baring against that--
people don't sleep soundly in the wild! That is the whole point of our species. Fall asleep beneath a rock and you may wind up crushed by a rock!
But that sway, the safe humming of the wind through the grass and the sails of the boats moored in the marina and the brief snatches of laughter kipping up through the wind on the tails of kites as kids ran without care . . . we'd shoved our bags in a pile woven between us, limbs fanned upon each other, rising and falling with every breath.
Mac Demarco's Salad Days has that same sense of sleepy adventure. Waking woozily somewhere wholly foreign, yet tethered to the same progressing path of space and time. Sleeping your way across a landscape of disquieting pleasantries. Wherever you fall asleep eventually you wake up. Wherever you dream on the other side you return alone. Unmoored.
It is restful, sure. But it is impossible to shake that knowledge of change. The world doesn't wait for you to wake up, but in order to fall asleep, you have to consign yourself to trusting it. You do so at your own risk.
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