THE NATURE OF ANXIETY

Here I am in Vancouver hiding in my bunk on the bus, just off Granville street – the busiest, ickiest corridor in this city. Mystery feces + drunk jocks = human danger. Daylight doesn’t really matter here. We are at the halfway point of a month-long tour and we are all very tired. Every dream is an anxiety dream – a dream where I don’t know any of the lyrics, a dream where I am driving the New Pornographers around in a van with hardly any brakes. I keep having to say "I’m sorry” as I overshoot a turn. I also have to play drums that night. I’m practicing WHILE driving? It’s actually sounding OK…? Hmmm.

Yesterday was a day off in Salem, Oregon, but it did NOT feel like one because A. the waxing Strawberry Moon has kept me from getting good sleep for DAYS and B. most of this day was taken up by an emergency nap that was completely draining and unrestful due to the stress and chaos of this one particular anxiety dream. In it I was trapped in sleep paralysis in a bandmate’s room, in their bed while they were out. The blankets weighed a thousand pounds. I was stuck. I was not napping in my own room because theirs was quieter…? I was awake but could not move. I knew my bandmate was returning soon with their visiting sister and I wasn’t wearing pants. I was stealing a nap in their room but didn’t think to wear pants for the get-away and to not mortify everyone on the scene. OK? Also, inside the dream I had visited my bandmate earlier in the day and they had shown me something horrifying. 

In a little closet alcove they had set up a sort of human litter-box, it was the regular pan shape but a bit larger. There were strange homemade bellows like a lid pointing upward… I guess that’s where your butt was supposed to go? I imagined (unfortunately) that trying to balance over the contraption would be impossible? The bellows had a small hole in the top (again for the butt?) fashioned from crisp white bed sheets. (God, I hope I wasn’t sleeping on them now?!) The whole thing looked like a small one-man tent, or a paper mache tagine oven. What was this “litterbox” for, you may be asking yourself? Well, it turns out my bandmate had an infestation of ANTS. In their COLON. And not just ONE kind of ant but MANY species. Like a trail mix of ants in many sizes, colors and levels of bitey-ness. I was (unfortunately, again) visited by a flash visual of the teeming ants sluicing outward. The "litter-box” was a toilet/ant trap. Good god, man! What am I ACTUALLY worried about here?! Only the tour gods know for sure.