well, shit: in some ways

I am so behind on synthesizing the things that you two have written lately. I know there is no demand to do so, but I like to, I need constant intellectual weaving--and what you both have been saying is a way into it that specifically privileges the gaze and getting dressed. So: both eternal and easy. In some ways.

(image from: MARY OCHER - On The Streets Of Hard Labor (youtube.com))

Emily asked me about what I wear to bed when I know I will likely not sleep, will likely be caught in the blue-jewel-gaze of our little laptop playing the TV. 

Well shit.

I mean: on the one hand, I absolutely dress for comfort at bedtime. To be quite honest, I get into my night clothes sometime between 7 and 8, sometimes at the same time that Loulou is getting ready for bed, sometimes before. We three often watch a show or play a board game from 7 to 8--and it is quite likely that I will have my night "outfit" on, at that time. Or I might do it after I shower, around 8:30. I do so like to put on my little headwrap (from Emily) and leave it to soak up the water until 10 or so, sitting on the couch with Phil in my night clothes and blue light glasses. I feel like a lady in some other time or place. Kind of 1940s. Kind of Nanci Griffith, kind of Cyndi Lauper fighting with her Dad. 

Nothing in fashion discourse pleases me more than when function/necessity/accidental "style" merges with the pleasure of being alive in one's outfit.

(On the other hand,) my "comfort" nighttime dressing always takes the form of nightgowns. Emily probably knows this about me. Maybe, Kat, I have joked about it? 

I like regular old nightgowns: Lands End, Target, a few other random types. As I have aged, I find myself re-interested in the frumpier, dowdier ones, willing to put something like that on as a radical act and also as a genuine affection for that kind of lady, which, I guess, I am, now. There's something of my mom there--and perhaps we all three shiver a little at that: the "problem" of being one's mom, physically. The complex paperdoll drama. The ease with which we might slide that mask on. (I haven't even gotten into processing my other new bodily development: I often now require reading glasses, and when I put on my dollar store pair the first night, Loulou snapped a picture and told me that I look just like my mom. Oh well. But also, that's cool.)

But now I want to get to this:

I have all the modes of sleep disorder in that sometimes I simply cannot fall asleep, sometimes I fall asleep for ten minutes and then awaken, sometimes I sleep until 2 or 3, sometimes I wake up too early in the morning, etc. So, a few nights ago, I was writing in my head (a bad good habit I have when I am anxious about falling asleep, or a good bad habit, maybe), and I was thinking about Emily's question, and I fell asleep. In the mere ten minutes I was asleep, I dreamt/visioned (maybe? I was kind of awake, still) that I was (or I was looking at myself as) an old lady in a nightgown (definitely of the frump variety) in a shitty living room, saying to some visitor, late afternoon, hazy, "let's be bad," which meant something about time travel and upsetting chronology and/or something about entering a psychedelic space. My faves, obvi. I actually don't know how but will somehow write this detail, this sensation into the manuscript I am working on: looking=disappearance=amnesia=whistling (peripetyandortronies.blogspot.com) (that's just FYI, no pressure). 

All to say:

I might be dressing for this moment.

I mean: I might be dressing for this moment, when I go to bed, which often means when I get into the bed for an hour and then leave to watch shows.

But I want it all the time.

To dress for the moment when I will be this old lady who is tripping on time travel and dipping into some zone of "being bad" that means leaving the logical order.

Em, remember when you sent me, on your birthday, that picture of an old lady with candles on her head? Do you still have it?

I want the work of this kind of fashion.

Kat, writing on fashion/getting dressed as "Making me homesick for a place entirely constructed from imagination. No latitude or longitude can be provided," that's a whole dressing ethos I can dig.

In fact, I only want that.