Night Fears

Well, the first episode of the Sopranos has, frankly, fucked with my head. I’m thinking of the sequence where Eugene Pontecorvo, doomed by Tony’s diktats, looks at photos of his son in happier times and then hangs himself. This put me in a very dark place. It wasn’t simply the way the camera lingered as he jerked around on the noose; it was the man’s despair at his boy’s loss of innocence and heroin addiction. As father of two sons, that taps into a deep fear for me – the prospect of being alienated by your own children as they drift into hopelessness.

This didn’t particularly hit me until I was disturbed at 4am by a fly crawling on my hand. Ironically, it was the dying, drowsy fly that I thought I had killed before I went to sleep. When I had swatted it from the wall with a magazine it must have fallen onto the bed. Still half-asleep I brushed it from my hand.

Then I dreamt that Amazon actually worked by employing flies with their wings pulled off to sort information in a shoebox.

I think I heard the buzzing of the fly and awoke to find it crawling on my duvet. I flicked it onto the floor and tried to crush it with a book. Although horribly injured, the bloody thing just wouldn’t die. It just kept righting itself and crawling feebly. This obviously put me in mind of Eugene hanging in his garage, the life taking forever to rattle from him. Then my thoughts turned to his son and my sons, night fears seizing me.

I suppose good drama provokes an emotional reaction. Or was it the parmesan I had on my pasta?