How Not To Have A Sore Back at 6 AM

Well, in case you missed it, I bought a mattress.  In retrospect, it wasn't quite the huge cavalcade of ridiculousness that it seemed at the time. It was only a small tsunami of ridiculousness.  But it was still pretty ridiculous.  I think buying a used car was actually easier, and that's not even taking into account the fact that I have incredible luck with buying used cars.  ( Take, for example, the '79 Datsun; purchased at 150k miles, drove it for 100k more, no major repairs apart from replacing the clutch, though the ceiling eventually fell on me.) You might check out Consumer Reports and read a few articles and check a few Web sites to buy a used car.  You can fricking read BOOKS about how to buy mattresses.  And even then, you still don't know everything you need to know, such as how not to end up paying almost twice as much as you set out to do.

See, I wanted a Purple mattress.  If you go to Purple's Web site, you'll find it's nice and informative and explains everything you need to know.  Also, Purple's mattresses are purple.  Purple is my favorite color.  So it would have been totally and completely awesome to have a Purple mattress.  It would have even come with free purple sheets.

But here was the problem, as well as the problem with online mattress purchases generally.  Purple is not a "traditional" mattress.  It's not designed to be placed on a box springs.  It's designed to be placed on a single hard surface, like a flat bed with no box springs.  The kind you get at Ikea.  So in order to get a new mattress, I would have had to get an entirely new bed.

Now, I wasn't really down on that concept.  The current bed I've had for a very long time.  I won it in the divorce, actually, and the divorce was one of those things that happened in the Time Before Joan (TM).  Seeing as Joan and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary, you do the math. I've had this bed for a very long time.  Besides, Ikea beds aren't very expensive.  You can get one delivered and set up for about $400.00.  But this is where the logistics began to get difficult.

See, in order to get a new bed, I would have to get rid of the old bed.  So someone would have to come help me take it apart, carry the pieces outside, and put it out for the bulky trash guys.  Which meant it could only be done during one week of the month, in case nobody adopted it and it was actually still there by the time the bulky trash guys showed up.  (Not likely in our neighborhood; everything even slightly valuable or practical disappears almost as soon as you put it out there, except for that fucking combination printer/scanner/fax that we had for a while, and I can only assume that our neighbors heard me yelling at it.  Hell, they heard me yelling at it in Indonesia.)

Okay, so let's say we got the bed successfully out of the house.  Now, the removal of the bed from the house had to be timed just so, so that the bed from Ikea showed up on the same day or at the very latest, the next day.  And then the guys who were going to put it together would need to show up, and they would have to have no problems whatsoever with their cute little Allen wrenches and the many parts.  If there was a delay of a day or two, I would have to find somewhere else to sleep.  And then, even when all that was done, there was the question of when the new mattress would be delivered.  If it showed up a few days early, where would we put it?  If it showed up a few days late, would I be sleeping on the couch?

Seriously, this was starting to give me a headache.  In desperation I wrote to our friend Suzy, who is much better about logistics than I am.  And true to form, she laid out an exacting, six or seven point plan about how to get the new bed and mattress into the house without having to sleep on the couch and suchlike and so forth.  (Thanks, Suzy!)  The only problem was, I kept putting off the actual doing of the steps.

I think it was Joan who finally suggested maybe I was having trouble letting go of the old bed (it is a nice bed), and that maybe I should consider just getting a traditional mattress and box springs set and just have them delivered and forget about it, already.  And that's what I finally did.  I drove out to Nebraska Furniture Mart (which is a lot like Ikea, only without the Allen wrenches) and picked one of the mattresses that I'd deemed a suitable substitute for the Purple mattress.  It happened to be on sale.  I had it delivered.  The nice folks at NFM hauled away the old mattress and box springs, and suddenly I had a new mattress.

I woke up the next morning at 6 A.M. and lo and behold, my back didn't hurt.  That's the first time that's happened in, oh, about two years.

So I have a new mattress.  I'm not used to it yet.  Oh, it's fine to sleep on, but I sit down on the bed very tentatively so as not to disturb it.  It's a hybrid mattress, part springs and part supportive foam, so I kind of sink down into it, which is actually really nice.  But I'm like almost afraid to put weight on it.  What if it starts to sag?  Oh, it has a nice ten year warranty and all that, but still, you never know...