Again

A bit of fog, a bit of mist, an absence of moon and stars, and then the circumspect wind sounding in distant trees, seldom drawing near, hour after hour. Here, no more than a slight pressure of cool air brushes me, like the declining year's sigh. Now and then a few small drops of rain fall, and sound like grains of sand, and I think of deserts.

( Sunday Verse )

Dig

Feeling curiously disengaged, I sit listening to the rain which began falling about the time sunset would have happened had the clouds not been too thick to allow it. The tail-end of December is usually my least favorite time of year, anyway. For me, it's like a wake for somebody I didn't like very much, and everybody else is drinking and having a good time and I'm sitting in a dark, distant corner thinking it's about time we got this cadaver into the ground before it starts to smell even worse than it did in life.

In fact, the best thing about the last week of December is that it causes words like "cadaver" to pop into my mind. It's a funny word. It has that "k" sound beloved of old-time burlesque comics. So does "burlesque." OK, now I'm maundering, detached from reality. I take on some characteristics of a cadaver myself, this time of year, but one that is partly animated. Maybe I need to eat some brains. That would be funnier if the word for brains had a "k" sound in it. We could call them Kix, I suppose. Do they still make Kix? It was a popular breakfast cereal when I was a kid. Little lumps of some grainy compound, shaped and surface-textured a bit like a tiny, dried brain. My brain feels like Kix this time of year.

Today was the second day in a row that I woke up very, very late in the afternoon. The slippage in my sleeping schedule has been going on for almost four years now. I'm surprised that it has taken this long to slip this far, but once the day comes when I don't wake up until nightfall, either I'll have to re-set my internal clock, or I'll be hopping on board the bipolar express. Oh, how I dislike the winter.