Every now & then I have a nightmare where I have to get up and walk around the house or watch lame 3am TV for a half hour to clear my head. This week there was a good one: something about being in an arena surrounded by barbed wire, with shattered glass and bits of once-living things on the ground, only to be tackled by two emotionless zombies who pounded silver nails up under my kneecaps with heavy wooden mallets; I'd wrestle a hand free, twist out a nail with a claw hammer, only to have two more driven into other joints. No rhyme or reason. I could see waking up and having a cramp in my knees, maybe, and that would have explained it away -- body signals intruding on dream-space. But no, it was simply pointless, restless, and mean. My brain acting up. Not even a story to enjoy.
Still, night time is the right time for me. Silent. Nobody expects anything of me after midnight. No phone calls. I can surf the web, draw maps of imaginary places, scribble words in whatever notebook is at the top of a pile, plan out video games I'll probably never actually write. Normally, after midnight is my time, and I'll take every hour of it I can get. It's a finite resource, and there's a comedy factor: if I stay up past 4am, an unquenchable hunger sets in. So I try to hit the sheets before that. And every night I try to leave some traces behind.
Time fries when not having fun. What is fun anyway?
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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #23, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.
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