The Neurotic’s Guide to Buying a Mattress

So you’re ready to buy a mattress!

The careful buyer is encouraged to examine the details of the product: what is the density of the memory foam? (Three pounds per cubic foot at the very least.) Coils should have a thickness of around 13 to 15 on the gage scale. And behind all the data, for heaven’s sake, use your common sense. Avoid pushy salespeople, don’t imagine that a cheap mattress will deliver the same quality or durability of one a few hundred dollars more, and always check out the warranty.

These steps however only get you so far.

At some point you’re going to have to lay on the thing and see how it actually feels.

Does it support your back in the manner you desire? Does the surface have the same firmness all over? Does it ‘give’ in a pleasing manner when you sit on the edge, does it have a bounce to it which suggests a long life?

These steps too only get you so far.

I have found that to truly understand how a new mattress might fit in with my sleep patterns, I have to take my investigations a step further.

It should be a simple matter to speak to your salesperson and ask if you can sleep on the mattress overnight in the store.

I personally want to see how it does under real world conditions, in the 2:30 AM to 5:15 AM time period, when I do my best, or you might say, my worst worrying.

If I am going to be lying there sleepless in the middle of the night staring at the darkened ceiling in a state of existential despair, I want to know that I have bought the very best mattress under me to support me in my time of need.

The store has long been closed now, the workers have gone home hours ago, most of the lights are off…perfect test conditions.

I proceed in order, stiffening my body, mummy-like, into a stance of worry and terror and consider the things I have to worry about. Well, to be honest, sometimes too I curl my body into what I believe is called the fetal position.

The appliances rise to the top of the list.

I think they are talking to one another.

It is one thing for the variety of mechanical and electronic devices to individually begin emitting noises that signal a breakdown isn imminent.

It is another for them to simultaneously start to chirp, grind, growl, groan, clink, and clang.

It reminds me of nothing so much as malcontents in the prison exercise yard chattering to one another in ominous tones, muttering and murmuring, making plans, coordinating.

They like to do this, these appliances – I’m talking about all of them! The dishwasher, the refrigerator, the electric can opener, the furnace, the sump pump! – on or near the 3:45 AM hour, and I wonder if they have set this time because they think that no one will be paying attention.

I have heard of this ‘Singularity’ whereby the machines gain enough intelligence to begin communicating among themselves and make plans to overthrow their human masters and take over the planet.

Is this the first sign of this? Should I tell someone?

That keeps me going for a while, and then I start to thinking about the horses in movies, in westerns.

You must have seen it a million times. The cowboys rides into town, dismounts in front of the saloon, and then lightly tosses the reigns over a horizontal post, put there for exactly that purpose. And then he just walks away. Walks away.

My question is, there at about 4:12 AM: why doesn’t the horse do the same? Walk away, I mean?

No one is looking! Everyone’s paying attention to the big showdown there inside the saloon! This is not a tie or a knot of the reigns. They guy just threw them over the post in a careless motion. The horse could just back up a few paces and then go on his merry way for the rest of his life.

Why doesn’t he?

At this point I remind myself why I’m here. Staring at the ceiling wondering about that damn horse, do I feel that my lumbar support from the mattress is where it needs to be? How about my neck? Are the upper vertebrae aligned in a manner consistent with good posture?

So far so good!

I worry too about the percussion guy in the local orchestra.

It is only a matter of time before the rest of the players, who are sweating it out trying to play the thousands of notes flying across the pages in front of them, figure out that this guy is responsible for about a dozen notes through the whole night.

They are flashy moments too, big visual displays of noise-making on the kettle drums and that big-ass cymbal, that rouses the audience and strikes a scene that the poor piccolo players slaving away on their puny instruments can never match.

In a typical performance of say two and a quarter hours, if this guy actually worked more than three minutes total I would be surprised.

It would not stun me in fact to hear that he, this percussion fellow that I still speak of, sneaks out in the long period between the flashy overture and the bravura closing and wanders down to the local saloon and downs a beer or two.

There he sits, taking it easy, sip, sip, sipping, while the rest of the orchestra is breaking their backs trying to bring the piece over the finish line. He’s probably watching a basketball game on the TV to while away all this free time he has!

Man, it makes me mad just to think about, and I’m not even all that directly affected by this behavior.

I just have to think that the rest of the players are livid, and it will be only a matter of time before fighting breaks out right there on the stage and they start to chase the percussion guy like peasants chasing down Frankenstein’s monster, waving their instruments like weapons.

At this time, in this excited emotional state, I check the mattress to ensure that my hips are properly – and evenly, that’s the most important thing – supported and that I feel no tension in the shoulders or upper back.

I settle then into worrying about the Neanderthals.

You know, those guys were thriving right alongside the earlier progenitors of homo sapiens, just minding their own business, building their own civilization.

They had bigger brains that we do, did you know that? So how come they went extinct and here we are, just plowing through history? What drove them from the face of the planet?

I’m thinking now that as a civilization they had introduced certain business practices put out by their Human Resources Department, things like performance reviews, forced rankings, team-building exercises, and lunch-n-learns, which seem almost designed to weaken the constitution and even the will to live.

If they followed that up with unbelievably complicated expense report procedures, well, that might make any species roll their eyes and go, “that’s it, I’m going extinct.”

Or you know, there would have been a certain amount of romance between the Neanderthals and the humans, young blood and what not.

It’s entirely possible that some of those guys found themselves linked up with some human females – nice girls! Don’t get me wrong! But a bit hard on the system if you are of a relaxed, kind of easygoing Neanderthal nature – and after a certain amount of time they, the Neanderthals I mean, went ahead and went extinct because they wanted to.

Those are just a couple of theories that I toss around there in the middle of the night though.

Are my arms supported nicely, this the question I’m asking myself at this point, and does the mattress allow for easy tossing and turning?

I worry about the 77th trombone, thinking how that guy feels, watching the first 76 just marching around like madmen.

I worry about the words disheveled and disgruntled…are the words heveled and gruntled out there somewhere and my erratic education has somehow let them elude the grasp of my keen intellect?

I worry too – a lot if you want to know the truth – that I have never understood valet parking.

Oh, I get that you’re paying someone to go park your damn car while you go do some damn overpriced event downtown, maybe even that same symphony performance I was considering so deeply a couple of hours ago, but who do you tip? I say again, who do you tip? And when?

These questions race around my mind like a cat chasing its tail.

I don’t want to reveal myself as a rube from out here where the street numbers start in the 300s or so, but it seems that it is made unclear, perhaps deliberately so, who you tip and when.

Is it the guy at the stand? Is it the guy who takes the car? Is it the guy who brings the car back? Is it, again, here at the back end of this exciting car parking narrative, the guy at the stand?

The only solution I have come up with is to raid my retirement savings — prudently never withdrawing more than 30% of the total at a time, I’m not a complete idiot — and amass a wad of 100 five dollar bills for the front half of the evening, and another wad of 100 five dollar bills for the back half of the evening.

I then, once I am into the city precincts proper, simply give a five dollar bill to everyone I run across, thanking them for their prompt service.

This includes the fellows drinking something they keep in a paper sack for some reason, criminals fleeing from their latest robbery, policemen, waiters, loitering gang members, and people simply walking by. Then I do the same thing on the way out of the auditorium and out of town.

In this manner, an evening out to an already overpriced event runs a few grand.

I know that some would say that this is overkill, but is it? Is it really?

I don’t, like I say, want to look unsophisticated to these fine city-dwellers.

Wondering if I am really getting in right on this tipping matter, I pay special attention to my upper back, the source of so much misery for modern man. Is this mattress providing relief to those overworked muscles where so many of us carry our tension?

About now the sun is rising and the store is starting to stir, and when he shows up at opening time I thank my salesperson for his excellent attention to customer satisfaction.

You see, it really is best to take these mattresses for a test drive, so to speak, and see how well they can adapt to your special circumstances. Really special.