Too much Bojack Horseman

And a sunrise alarm clock with the fire in its belly to change all that

AI generated image using prompt: intelligent horse cityscape sunset

A quick note to thank the Mid-Atlantic Review for publishing two of my poems this past Friday. Please check them out if you’re so inclined. Thanks!

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This past summer, as we canoed down the Upper Missouri, my new friend and fellow adventurer Laura recommended a sunrise clock for getting your circadian rhythms synced up with the rest of the world’s. Mine, if left to its own devices, slips further and further into a louche darkness, slouching into one more episode of Bojack Horseman’s spectacular self-sabotage that I definitely shouldn’t have watched. 

This isn’t helped by the layout of my apartment. I live in what real estate agents like to call a “jr. 1 BR,” by which they mean that there is only one window in the place, and it’s not in the bedroom — it’s a big sliding glass door in the living room, and my bedroom has a window into the living room, giving it some light. The light, however, is dull — due to the placement of my apartment in the building, I never get direct sunlight, only reflected light.

What I’m saying is that my bedroom is dark, which is great for sleeping past 9 am, especially if you’ve gone to bed at 3 am after watching too much Bojack Horseman.

What with one thing and another — probably having bad sleep hygiene — I only got around to buying the circadian clock a few weeks ago, and I love the thing. It’s marketed as “Wake Up Light Sunrise Alarm Clock for Kids and Heavy Sleepers.” 

Here’s what happens: 20 minutes before I’m due to wake up, the broad, round face of this clock, like my own personal sun beside me, turns a little warmer, a soft, glowing red. Then a little warmer still, like it has a fire in its belly.

Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash

Over the next 20 minutes, the light grows yellower and yellower, more and more towards a pure white, till finally, when it’s time for me to get up, it’s a full glowing ball of excitement about my day. At this point, when it can’t stand the buildup any more, it explodes into noise: a cascade of birds chirping. 

At first this barely woke me up at all but now I do recognize it as my alarm and can usually wake up before the owl hoots, about two minutes into the alarm.

This is supposed to reset your circadian rhythm to make it easier to wake up — honestly I find the opposite is true and it makes me want to lie in bed all morning pressing snooze and listening to the birds and enjoying my tiny, very excitable fake sun.

But I have to admit, for whatever reason, I am going to sleep way earlier.

I mention all this because this past weekend, Tom Pluck (of What Pluckery is This? fame) and his lovely wife Sarah had a Mardi Gras party. I showed up hours late because I read the “show up anytime!” part of the invitation and not the “food is at 4” part of the invitation.

Did I mention I have bad sleep hygiene?

Anyway, they were very nice about it, and because I was staying over (they live in New Jersey), we hung out anyway with another couple who were staying in town and then they collapsed as people who have given an all-day party are likely to do.

I went to bed too and in the morning, something amazing happened. It was like the sunrise clock — *but in real life* y’all!

Slowly, over 20 minutes or more, the room became brighter! I heard the chirping of birds! 

If you haven’t yet seen Tom’s McGuivered rig to get candid camera pics of his local morning doves, blue jays, and grackles, please let me introduce you to this delight. (You can also find pics on his Instagram at @thomaspluck.)

Taken from Tom’s post, Proud to be a Foxhog

I felt like I was meeting local bird celebrities.

Tom and Sarah were sleeping in, so I snuck out the back door and sat on their patio. On this February morning, the swimming pool was covered, the hammock was off its rack, leaving a banana skeleton behind. The branches were thin bones, the shed doors closed. A male cardinal flashed fire engine red, the only color in the yard.

The mourning dove made that whirring flight sound, like a robot bird let loose on an unsuspecting world. The grackles fought like they always fight, and the squirrels ran in and out of the fence diamonds.

It was fabulous.

I’ve been thinking about how nature gets filtered through the lens of “city” for me ever since I commented on Antonia Malchik’s amazing post on her newsletter, On the Commons:

This counts

Here’s what I wrote:

I love hearing you talk about ice while, from my perspective, I’m driving down U street in Washington DC, which is an area filled with nightclubs and bars and restaurants, and a big group of men on motorcycles pulled up in front of everyone waiting at the light — they were getting ready to block traffic pulling their handlebars way back and going up on one wheel and other such tricks. I was right behind them & the rider at the back kept glancing at me to make sure I wasn’t getting impatient & wasn’t going to try to crowd them or honk or anything. And I was trying to signal to him, nah, man, it’s fine, y’all take all the time you want, I’m learning why we create back here, I’m imagining foggy mornings and walks to school in the cold and the years I fell in love.

It’s all true, I was watching the men doing their wheelies on their motorcycles while listening to Antonia talk about vast frozen lake. That’s how nature gets filtered, sometimes. It starts off in cold and ice and ends up right next to Ben’s Chili Bowl and Harlot DC’s drag brunch and fuel exhaust and peacocking men, so many men on their tight, slim machines, full of rage and excitement and piss and testosterone, looking so fine as they lean all the way back, parallel to the pavement and lifting rubber from the road like a herd of wild stallions.

AI generated image using prompt: Black men wheelies motorcycles cityscape

Because nature has to be intentional for me, and I have to decide to find it and when and how will I get there and so on, sometimes it doesn’t happen for me. Sometimes a weekend will pass, and no nature will happen for me at all.

That’s when I depend on the nature writing here and elsewhere to help me along.

Here are some more of the nature newsletters I love to read, along with Tom’s and Antonia’s, especially when I can’t get out there myself:

And always, always, I bring Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy with me everywhere I go — the textbook used in a class taught by Chris La Tray, author of the Irritable Metis newsletter.

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A few months ago, I had a weekend like that. John Spiegel, a member of my Jewish congregation, had passed away a few days earlier.

Fabrangen is a haverah, a group of Jews who gather for study, fellowship and prayer. What that means is that there’s no Rabbi, everyone takes turns leading services, we sit in a circle around the torah laid flat on a tie-dyed tablecloth, and the aging hippies who make up almost the entire congregation are beginning to die.

In a group like that, no one is *the* heart, *the* center of the congregation.

But John was a heart.

He lived with Lou  Gehrig’s disease for many years, and we watched his physical abilities change over those years. Despite the changes, he often referred to his radiant joy at something from his day, often something from the natural world: a bird, a beautiful landscape.

“No one tells you that about disability,” he would say. “You don’t really mind. When you can’t do one thing, you do something else. When I couldn’t bike any more, I payed more attention to the birds.” 

When he died, it was an honor to sit shomer for him — to sit with his dead body in the next room, keeping him company before the burial could be held. People were hired for the overnight shifts, but members of the congregation filled the daytime shifts. I had a shift on a Sunday afternoon.

The funeral home had a driveway running the length of the building down to the parking lot, and beside the drive, behind the building, several men and women had bonfires going in three large metal barrels. 

This was not a Jewish ceremony — maybe it was Buddhist, I guessed. Tibetan? The fire tenders stuffed paper into the barrels by the bundleful — mostly tight rectangular bundles, probably prayers I thought, but also sometimes elaborate paper figures of buildings.

Just as I drove by, a three-tiered paper temple, colored bright orange and also orange with fire, floated into the air, driven by the heat, and started drifting towards my car. A woman fire tender caught my eye and then looked at the burning paper temple, drifting towards me. She lifted her long tongs, grasped it, stuffed it in the fire, looked back at me, and smiled. I drove on and parked in the back lot. It looked like it was snowing, but the flakes were ashes from the prayers and temples, falling.

For once in my life, I was early somewhere, so I sat on the back steps of the funeral home and read poems from Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. That’s what I would read to John, too. While I read, I watched the fire burn and burn, orange paint become orange fire become grey ash that lifted over the pine trees ringing the parking lot, lighter than air.

That was my nature for the week: love become fire become prayer become word become tree become smoke become air.

Here’s what I read to John:

January 21

A cessation.
You’re not searching.
How nice it is tonight.
Two birds fell asleep in your pockets.

-- Yannis Ritsos
1909-1990
translated from the Greek by Edmund Keely and Karen Emmerich.