The Common Bed

Every now and again while I’m out running errands, I like to visit mattress stores. I do this because I occasionally need some perspective on how other people live their lives, a perspective I ordinarily lack.

The thing is, I was raised by crazy people. (Look, I have a tremendous amount of empathy for the mentally ill, and I think the way our society treats them is abominable — but I reserve the right to refer to the people that I grew up with as absolutely coo-coo fucking bananas, okay? You haven’t met them; don’t judge me.) This means that ordinary, happy, well-adjusted people will forever be a mystery to me. Why do they do what they do? How do they do what they do?

More to the point, how can anyone spend a thousand bucks on a mattress?

I’ve owned cars less expensive than that. I can’t imagine dumping a grand into a piece of furniture that I’ll barely use (I don’t sleep a lot), or that nobody else will ever even see (I don’t sleep with others a lot). I don’t have a thousand dollar mattress because it wouldn’t fit in to my life in any reasonable way. But they exist, so there must be people out there for whom such luxuries are utterly ordinary. What can we deduce about these people?

They must be pretty sure that they’ll have a place to live for the foreseeable future. They are not anticipating that they might have to flee from their homes taking with them only what they can carry in their hands. If they do have to move, they must believe that they’ll have access to some form of transportation that will accommodate their bougsie-ass bedding.

These are obviously long term planners. The coming years are no mystery to them; they know that the will always have a job, or at least money, in the future. If they’ve bought a bed large enough to fit two people, then they must also be pretty sure that they’ll also have some sort of companion in that bed with them. (Although why that should be a desirable thing, I have no idea. I have observed that other human beings tend to snore, sweat, and steal blankets in their sleep. Also they sometimes fart, and then get upset when you wake them up with your laughter.)

Also, I think it’s safe to assume that the people who buy $1,000 mattresses are “sleepers.” That is, they dedicate so much of their lives to obtaining rest that they are willing to go big when it comes to purchasing the requisite equipment for the process. They may spend up to six hours a night unconscious. While I admire the dedication their to their hobby, it’s not something I share. I have found that when one lies awake for most of the night, subtly vibrating with tension and dread, it hardly matters if you are enduring the experience in a California King or a sleeping bag on the floor. In fact, based on my occasional visits to hotels, I believe that I would resent all the extra crawling one has to do in order to get out of bed to crawl around on the floor for awhile.

It’s important to think about this stuff — to remember that the way one lives is not necessarily the way that others do. We all have to live with each other. We all have to anticipate how the people we meet will react to different situations. For instance, people who have a thousand dollar bed to go home to will probably not understand why you take particular note of the emergency exits in every building you go to, why you refuse to sit near the big glass windows at the front of the coffee shop, or why you won’t go to any of those farmers’ markets they set up in the middle of a roped off thoroughfare. They aren’t constantly preparing for everything to go wrong. If they were, they wouldn’t buy a thousand dollar boat anchor.