I am in Los Angeles, California. Six feet from the loudest noise ever made by a man. I’m surprised that I’m not more annoyed by his snoring than I am. Here I am writing simply because his breathing is so constrained that I can’t pass out after a nearly sleepless week. But I’m a pretty immature guy. And his snoring sounds like this biggest, juiciest, most impossibly loud summer-camp fart. Each time I think I’m about to punch the wall, I end up quietly filling my side of the hotel room with laughter as my poor friend’s face redefines my threshold for snot-breathing volume.
Before tonight, he was just a fellow graduate student with a distinctly thunderous laugh. And now, without warning, he brings whole new meaning to the human nasal passages and the air that fails and succeeds to pass through them. With a huge pillow tightly grasped to one side of my head, I am astonished by the fact that a noise that sounds to be the love child of a large broken zipper and a wind tunnel can make me laugh instead of vomit, or worse. Every now and then, he seems to choke on either the noise or the inability to breathe, and I am blessed with a few moments of silence while he suffocates. And it is in those moments that I wonder how on earth Dennis, our silent sleeping third roommate, can continue sailing through his dreams undeterred – only inches from our snoring friend’s head. How could he not have warned us?
But, I have a queen bed to myself, and I’m only meters from the ocean. I must count my blessings each. Which isn’t hard to do, what with the terrible trumpeting cadence that sends ripples of astonishing power across each surface of the universe.