Goodnight

Due to insufficient sleep yesterday, I took an unintended nap tonight. I was lulled to sleep by the sound of the furnace and the warm air rushing through the ducts under the floor. The air in the ducts causes a slight but sensuous vibration in the floorboards, you know. If you lie down near a vent on a cold night, there's no way you can stay awake. I was doomed. Now it's too late to do anything, and I'm still groggy from napping, anyway, so wouldn't make much sense. I woke with vague memories of a dream in which I was tasting whipped cream from a series of bowls, but it always turned out to be Cool Whip. Yes, it was a nightmare. I ache as though I had been eating Cool Whip. That's the result of sleeping on the hard floor. And I never found out how that television program ended. Well, yes, I know that the Nazis lost that war, but that was in the universe in which I went to sleep. What if, while sleeping, I was transported into a universe in which they won? Because I fell asleep before the end of the program, I'd never know. That's why I always like to finish watching a documentary, just in case. If I wake up tomorrow and everybody is speaking German, I'm going to be so pissed!

Oh, yeah. The insufficient sleep yesterday was the result of my being wakened by spaghetti sauce. For some reason, I can no longer abide the smell of food cooking while I'm asleep. In recent weeks, I've been prematurely wakened by the odors of grilled cheese, waffles, chili, and now spaghetti sauce. Once I'm awake, from this cause at least, I can never get back to sleep. It's enough to put me off my feed. Luckily, it didn't do so this time, because the spaghetti was damned good. I only wish that it had been delayed an hour or two.

Now, back to sleep -- in a bed this time, with lots of covers against the cold, and a purring cat next to the pillow.

Impending Nostalgia

The small purple flowers of the sourgrass are pursed tighter than a church lady's lips, because the air is colder than the proverbial witch's teat. (I knew a witch, once. Her name was Linda, and her teats were anything but cold. I have no idea what the coiner of that proverb was thinking.) One would think that, given the wintry chill, the oak leaves would be getting more color and falling in great numbers, but it is not so. They remain brown, and the trees are hoarding them. It is as though fall had been put on hold, and is sitting there in an unheated room listening to that bad hold music and daydreaming, forgetting to go about its business of paving the streets with color. Or maybe fall is dead, and has been cryogenically frozen, a dumb look on its face. The other day, I passed by a pair of dying ponderosas, most of their needles golden brown. As I watched, the setting sun escaped the gray clouds and sent a shaft of light directly onto the trees, so that they flushed a vivid shade of red. It was the brightest thing I've seen in days.

As I'm not having much luck with the current November, I'm thinking I ought to indulge my nostalgia and spend the remainder of the month in an earlier November when I also didn't have much luck, but a lot more fun. It was before I began keeping a paper journal, and the memories are hazy, augmented only by a few words scribbled on random scraps torn from small spiral notebooks and by a few artifacts to which I have clung. I wonder if I could reconstruct that time from that scant material? I'm considering this in spite of the fact that I have two long bits of writing begun within the last year which I could be working on. But I don't have any feeling for those pieces at the moment. They actually go back even farther than the distant November which has begun to haunt me. It's as though I've moved past them again, in memory, and have to wait until I've dealt with the more recent events before the earlier ones can re-assert themselves. Sometimes the way my brain works confuses the crap out of me.