Pillowquest

I’ve been on a quest for some time now. A quest that…I just realized I called this post “pillowquest,” so I can’t really do the cute intro where I pretend this is a vital, important quest and then turn it around and be all like, “It’s a silly quest for a pillow, guys!”

I blew my own joke.

An astute reader, or even a semi-conscious one, would probably wonder why I don’t just go back and change the title, thereby fixing the problem with my joke.

Or, perhaps would wonder why I don’t use a word other than quest in that opening paragraph, like changing it to “crusade” so that the joke still had a shot at sneaking up on you.

But a dumbass who reads this on the regular will understand that this is par for the course. I’m really taking you on a journey of incompetence here. Enjoy the journey. ENJOY.IT.

---

When you’re a kid, you just kind of have a pillow. It’s the kind of thing most kids don’t really think about, like maybe pillows come with beds or something.

I don’t have many memories of childhood pillows with the exception of a feather-filled pillow I had at one point, which was memorable mostly because every so often, you’d lay on it and get poked in the face by the stem of a goddamn feather. No big deal right? It’s just a needle in the face.

Also, that pillow was memorable because it had this Nintendo case on it, which was pinnacle bedding for me.

Look at those off-model bad guys. People really just didn’t give a fuck back when, in the best way.

When I got a bit older, I still used whatever pillow I’d always had. The pillow I took to my first apartment was the one I’d been using at home through high school, for sure. If I bought a pillow during this period, it was probably because I spilled, I don’t know, coffee on the old one, and the process for picking out a new pillow was to drive to Target, look at the pillows, sort of try to lay your head on one, even though you’re standing and it’s wrapped in plastic, and then just get whichever was the cheapest because this was before the time when someone invented slogans like, “Your head spends a third of its life on a pillow,” or whatever.

My first serious pillow purchase was from the purveyor of fineries, City Market in Moab, Utah. I was on an annual camping/rafting trip where, for the second year in a row, I’d forgotten to bring a pillow.

This was not a camping trip for ultralight hardcore hikers or something, this was sleeping in a tent 10 feet from your car. It was absolutely possible for me to bring a pillow, I just goddamn forgot twice in a row because I’m not good at camping.

I think to be good at camping, you have to be good at thinking about your life as though nothing could just be set aside to wait until you’re ready to use it. It’s like campers have no sense of object permanence. If I didn’t see it, write it on a list, and then put it in a backpack, it does not exist in camp.

I’m the opposite of that. I try to set up my life to be as automatic and mindless as possible. I know “mindfulness” is the name of the game these days, but I’m older, and mindlessness is my generational culture. Don’t tread on it, please.

I’m also not good at camping because I’m just not good at life. Someone successful would probably endure one trip, 3 nights in a tent with no pillow, and never make the same mistake. The next year, this person would pack a pillow first and follow it up with less necessary things like shoes. Because if you forget your shoes, it’s cool, you can just stay in the tent so long as you’ve got a pillow to help make you comfy.

But I didn’t learn my lesson, and after I set up my tent and got spread out, I realized, Oops, I did it again.

On day 2 of the trip, I went into town, tagged along on the daily trip to get ice, because I figured maybe, just maybe, they’d sell pillows at the grocery store.

And…they did. Well, sort of. They didn’t sell pillowS, they sold A pillow.

The pillow was ugly as hell. It was green and white striped, and it was called Grandma’s Pillow. Or Grandpa’s Pillow. I can’t remember which, and I don’t know why the store had to humiliate me with a pillow named for an elderly person. Maybe it’s punishment for having the memory of an elderly person, because only a dope who forgot a pillow for the second year in a row would be desperate enough to roam the grocery store aisles in search of one. Which, fair.

Because I’m a man, after the camping trip concluded, this pillow made it into my regular rotation on the bed. It’s a pillow, what else do you do with one?

I discovered there’s an answer to this question, but before I go into it, just understand that, yes, I know, it’s like a hack comedy thing to talk about how women like having a million pillows. It’s hack for a reason, and that reason is because every person experiences it, and yet it’s still somehow shocking. It’s why airline food was such a comedy staple: We all know it’s bad, we’ve all heard it’s bad, and yet we’re still able to be shocked by its badness because it’s SO bad.

As a guy in my 20s, there was no concept of throw pillows or the accurately-named “shams” that would come to adorn my house later on when I shared it with another person who likes human touches and doesn’t buy snack bowls that are essentially dog bowl shaped so she could eat straight out of them without using her hands, a vital maneuver when you want to play video games and eat Munchies, the snack mix that was made by sweeping up the factory floor where they make Doritos. So, of course, the pillow went on the bed, and I started slept on it every night.

This could’ve gone on blissfully forever, but there’s a problem, dear reader: I sweat. A lot. Especially my head and face. Enough that my pillows, after maybe a year, look like a tooth from the mouth of a pretty hardcore coffee drinker 40 years into the habit. Give me a pillow for 5 years, and it looks like the same tooth after its been pulled for being just too gross to make any sense being connected to anyone’s body.

Pete’s pillows are deep in the teens, for sure

This is another feature of marriage: things that wouldn’t have bothered you, like having a yellow pillow, the yellowness covered by a pillowcase, become an issue. Which isn’t to say my wife or any wife out there is wrong about this. There’s really no reason that I should have owned an Xbox 360 AND a Wii and not had a pillow that’s somewhere between 1 and 10 on that handy tooth chart.

The first attempt we made at a pillow purchase was some kind of silicone pillow? Plastic rubber?

This:

I mean, how could this not be awesome? It’s a Future Pillow. For so long, pillows have just been bags of shit, really no more thought put into them than the improvised stuffsack pillow I made for camping stuffed with t-shirts, and NOW we’ve got like a grid of materials actually designed with the human head in mind. This is probably the brainchild of someone who was like, “You know, the pillow really hasn’t advanced much since some asshole stuffed corn husks in a sack back on the ol’ farm.”

I really could do sponsored ads for a pillow company. “Tired of resting your head on a sack of shit?”

Here’s the downside of this pillow: It must weigh 25 lbs. I’m not even kidding, it’s SO heavy. If you want to move it in the night, you can fuck right off with that, you’ll get a hernia, for sure. I wasn’t supposed to lift anything over 10 lbs. after my hemorrhoidectomy, and this pillow certainly qualifies.

It’s kind of “live” weight, too, which makes it even harder to move. It’s like moving a baby or something. Well, a dead baby that doesn’t cry and has turned purple. Am I comparing the trauma of moving this pillow to the death of a baby? Eesh, I guess I just did. Another good example of a time I could make use of the BACKSPACE key.

And, AND, 25 lbs. of day weight is different from 25 lbs. of night weight. At night, 25 lbs. may as well be a world championship deadlift.

On one hand, I did wonder if I should make everything in my life heavy, which would have a Harrison Bergeron effect, eventually making me so strong that I get shot in front of a bunch of people because I’m too beautiful to live.

But I’m a Comfort Bro more than I’m a Gym Bro.

Is Comfort Bro a thing already? Sounds like a male sex worker in a post-apocalyptic western town.

I was too weak for the purple pillow, too much of a frail, diminished old man. “Sad, weak, and pathetic,” are words that my wife used in her vows, and she was right to do so.

Speaking of my wife, she happened to get the perfect pillow at some point. It was from Target, and it’s the exact correct pillow for anyone. Firm, but not rock hard. Solid, but still something you want to put your head onto.

Of course, by the time we both figured out her pillow was perfect, Target didn’t sell it anymore. This is how things go: It takes a little while to figure out an item is perfect, and once you do, if you’re smart like me, you rush out to buy 3 more replacements (which is why I have 6 pairs of the same pants and 2 spare MP3 players boxed in a drawer), but most times, you don’t figure out the perfection until it’s too late, and of course nothing gold can stay.

I thought about trying the MyPillow.

And, I’ll be honest, I probably WOULD sleep on one if I thought it was any good. I know the guy who makes them is an inhuman monster, but I’m less concerned with that than the fact that he’s a dick and more concerned with the fact that I think he’s a huckster dick. My morals are weak, but my Spidey sense for what seems like a scam is pretty strong.

However, I may be onto something new.

Apparently, this is the pillow Taylor Swift uses, which is a thing we know because Swifties are fucking crazy in the best possible way.

I don’t KNOW that Taylor Swift is a sweaty fathead like yours truly, but I suspect it. Because SOMETHING must be driving that lady to create art, which is what we all do to distract ourselves and others from just how horrid and disgusting we are as human creatures. Based on the amount of art she’s created, compared to the amount of art I’ve created, she may be the sweatiest person to ever exist.

A lot of hay was made about this pillow being ONLY $70 dollars at the time it got the TayTay boost. Celebrities are just like us!

Like some of us, anyway. I don’t remember how much Grandma’s Pillow cost in a grocery store in Moab, Utah, but I guarangoddamntee you that for $70 bucks I probably could’ve bought the pillow, a case, and then filled the pillowcase with all the 3.2 beer Utah could provide.