on sunday some guy who was at one of the many HS graduation things that i attended all weekend long was going on about how beautiful it had been at 5:30 that morning when he’d woken up and he had to go outside because of all the beauty and he just stayed out and he went biking to a breakfast meeting (who has a breakfast meeting on sunday morning?) and then went for a long ride, blah blah blah.
so right now i’m thinking that it’ll be 5:30 in a little over an hour; i could stay up and start in with the biking and i don’t have any meetings at all scheduled for today (OR EVER IN MY WHOLE LIFE IF I CAN HELP IT), i could bike over to mom and dad’s house and say hi although they wouldn’t be awake til quite a long time after 5:30 or even six. better yet, i could bike right over to amy and jim’s house which would only involve biking down my driveway and then up theirs. or even more better still, i could just ride my bike across my lawn to theirs. or i could walk, which would be much simpler.
the thing is, for a while i’ve waking up in the middle of the night again and i’d be awake for a couple of hours and it makes me CRAZY. but then, sunday night, i slept all night long, beginning to end, start to finish, and it was great and i figured that i’d finally broken the cycle of waking up in the middle of the night and from now on sleeping would be no problem.
and yesterday, i was very very busy for most of the day. you could even say that maybe i overdid it a little, exercise and busyness-wise, but you’d think this would make me more worn out and able to sleep all night.
at three, though, i was awakened by a very loud THUMP THUMP THUMP on the doggie door. was it winnie, desperate to get in because it had started to rain? was he trying to get out?
now i think he was just trying to wake somebody up. since pretty much the only way to wake kevin is to shake him and say KEVIN WAKE UP! and even sometimes that doesn’t work, or winnie can wake him up by thumping him on the head, i figured that winnie was trying to wake me up.
i don’t know why he would have done this, because i don’t succumb to his frantic pleas to PLEASE GET HIM SOME FOOD RIGHT NOW BECAUSE HE’S OBVIOUSLY STARVING TO DEATH AND WASTING AWAY.
but so anyway, there i was at three a.m., very wide awake, and i was lying there thinking about how completely exhausted i felt plus a little sore from some perhaps overly-enthusiastic weight-lifting yesterday morning. i figured that i’d get right back to sleep because of being so tired, but after about an hour i figured that the time for “right back” had long passed.
herons, though they’re beautiful birds, have the most loud and uncouth SQUAWK and they’ve been doing a lot of that this morning.
mollie was also snoring loudly. i groped around in the dark for my earplugs but couldn’t find them so was forced to turn on the light – MY EYES! I’M BLINDED BY THE BRIGHT LIGHT! – and i searched around on the floor under the head of the bed. let me say that this is no place to be looking in the middle of the night, or any time at all for that matter. HUGE GLOBS OF DUST were under there, plus random kleenexes. i finally found the ear plugs, put them in, but they didn’t help at all with the sleeping.
i could go out and see how lovely it is outside right now. but it’s pretty much just dark, and i don’t want to disturb all the deer and herons and badgers and squirrels and beavers and raccoons out there having a large party.
i could go in the kitchen and put away the dirty dishes but i can tell you with complete certainty that that’s not going to happen.
i could turn on the tv because it’s close enough to actual morning that i’m sure there’s something on now besides infomercials, but the thought of that loud tv with that big screen is very annoying.
i guess plenty of things are annoying right now.
the thing is, i’m pretty sure winnie woke me up right smack dab in the middle of some heavy REM sleep. and you know if your REM is interrupted, you’re doomed to be tired forever because you need that deep deep sleep in order to be rested. i was having a complicated dream about floating somewhere, it was some flooded place that turned out to sea, except it was very complicated and when i woke up i kept trying to figure out exactly what was going on, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t really a dream but was something that needed to be solved right now.
it’s now 4:35 a.m. i’m going back to bed now except i know that i’m going to turn off the computer and crawl into bed and then i’ll suddenly think of something VERY VERY CRITICAL AND IMPORTANT that i wanted to write here, and that will continue to keep me WIDE AWAKE for even longer. i’ll finally fall asleep about six, and then, later, when i wake up for the final time of the morning, i won’t even remember what was so earth-shattering, or by some miracle i will remember it but i’ll say to myself, “what was wrong with me in the middle of the night? that’s not important at all.”
everything is VERY VERY IMPORTANT in the middle of the night.
ok then,
goodnight hopefully but i’m not counting on it or holding my breath,
middle of the night grace.