Shopping for a new mattress sucks. It amounts to hours of roaming around a show room floor while you desperately fling yourself onto one mattress after another; staring up at the ceiling and trying to assess in 20 seconds if THIS one won’t have you waking up feeling like you have spina bifida.
My “brand new” mattress, merely 6 months old, has already a perfect mold of my body in the fetal position, forever imprinted in it’s $800 high tech pillow top.
At night, I cautiously sit on the edge of my bed before rolling into position. It’s a little like sleeping in a Birkenstock sandal that has been worn for years. Great for walking but not so great for sleeping – turning over is out of the question – once situated snugly in my mattress sarcophagus there’s no getting me out. I’m like a million year old femur waiting to be dug out of a piece of limestone.
Why is it so hard for Americans to get comfortable in bed? How much money is spent in the course of a lifetime searching for a mattress that won’t leave us feeling like we spent the entire night spelunking? The Japanese sleep on the floor for Christ’s sake and they’re fine! Even their old people have the posture of an uptight librarian. I may not be the size of an umbrella stand, but do I really need to float weightlessly in space in order to get a good nights sleep?
It’s not like the average American is a 750 lb. sea dwelling mammal that needs to rest upon a platform of space age foam lest they be crushed beneath their own body weight. Can it really be that difficult to find ample support without looking to NASA for a solution? And quite frankly, I can’t afford anymore “free trial” periods. Oh, It’s free getting to your house, but not so much when you’re sending it back. Shipping was so steep on the last one, I took a dead bird I found in my yard and rubbed it all over the mattress then called customer service and said – “Um, yes I think I was sent a mattress that someone died on…. so……I’m just gonna send this one back.
I am now of the opinion that mattresses in general are just unnatural – our bodies are obviously not meant for for sleeping under such artificial conditions. I’ve decided to take the “organic” approach. I now sleep on a bed of hay that is situated between two modern contemporary night stands. The opposite side of the room is balanced quite nicely by a large dresser made completely of twigs, and held together by twine. I call it…..’barnyard chic’… and I think I may be on to something.
