Have Respect for Mattresses, Citizens!

A mattress is insatiable.  It demands sacrifices. At night it makes the 

sound of a bouncing  ball. It needs a bookcase. It needs a table with 

thick stupid legs. Creaking its  springs,  it demands drapes, a door 

curtain, and pots and pans for the kitchen. It shoves people and says to them:

     "Goon! Buy a washboard and rolling-pin!"
     "I'm ashamed of you, man. You haven't yet got a carpet."
     "Work! I'll soon give  you children. You need  money for nappies and a pram."
     A mattress remembers and does everything in its own way.
     Not even a poet  can escape the common lot. Here he comes, 

carrying one from the market, hugging it to his soft belly with horror.

     "I'll break  down your resistance,  poet," says the mattress.  "You  no

longer need  to run to the post  office to  write poetry. And, anyway, is 

it worth writing? Work and the balance will always  be  in your  favour. 

Think about your wife and children!"

     "I haven't  a wife," cries the  poet, staggering back  from his sprung
teacher.
     "You will have! But I don't guarantee she will be the loveliest girl on
earth. I don't even know whether she will be kind. Be prepared for 

anything. You will have children."
     "I don't like children."
     "You will."
     "You frighten me, citizen mattress."
     "Shut up, you fool.  You  don't know  everything.  You'll  also  obtain
credit from the Moscow woodworking factory."
     "I'll kill you, mattress!"
     "Puppy! If you dare to, the neighbours will denounce you to the 

housing authority."

That's an excerpt from a very funny comic Russian novel Twelve Chairs,
which you can read online.

Recently, Jonathan and I attempted to buy a mattress.

It's always been my dream to own a king sized bed. Plus Zoe sleeps with
us and Noah manages to as well sometimes. (i.e. we need it).

In 2001, I bought my sister a Tempurpedic mattress as an engagement
present. She's always loved good bedding. She didn't end up marrying
the guy, who was an inventor and invented the blue ink in American
Express Blue cards and made fake passports for the CIA, and she didn't
like the mattress either (too firm), so she gave it back to me and I'd
been sleeping on it ever since.

Jonathan loved it so we thought we'd buy another Tempurpedic. We 
did, the Contour Supreme (heavenly, firm), but it smelled terrible and 
we started reading frightening articles online about the neurotoxic 
chemicals it's made of. Zoe was just a few weeks old and we were 
afraid for her. We tried to air it out: removing the cover and standing 
it by the window every day for weeks, but when it hadn't stopped 
off-gassing after a month and a half, we returned it. 

After further research on the heath hazards of memory foam we 
decided to splurge and buy an Essentia, which is organic memory 
foam. They are crazy, crazy expensive, but we justified it with 
the idea that we would spend 8 hours a day on it for twenty years. 

Unfortunately, it was not very comfortable. Fortunately, it too was 
returnable. 

By now we are feeling defeated, tired of mattress shopping and unsure 
of what we wanted. So we headed to Sleepys. It's just very confusing, 
buying a mattress. You go to the showroom and lie down on ten or 
twenty of them and by the end you have no idea what you want 
anymore or how comfortable any of them really are. Do we really like 
"firm" mattresses, or have we simply always had one? The salesperson 
talks a lot of mumbo jumbo about coils and latex and alignment. She 
tried to convince me that firm mattresses are for fat people. Then 
later, after we'd bought the mattress, she starts telling me how her 
obstetrician kept harassing her about weight gain and gestational 
diabetes during her first pregnancy so she skipped prenatal care 
entirely for her subsequent children. I didn't even know you could do 
that. 





In the end we picked the first one we'd lain down on. And then we 
discovered that you can make an offer for a mattress. Sleepys prices 
are not fixed, you actually bargain with the regional manager via 
the salesperson. The mattress was $2900, on sale for $2600, we 
offered $2200 and that was fine. 

update: 4/2018: I went home that day and found the same mattress on Amazon for $1100.