No rituals, routines; And other details

Not that it’s any excuse, but I seem to be depressed.

Not that it’s anything new.

**********

And on the topic of ritual behavior and daily routines, I find myself … lacking.

While there are some things I do habitually, for instance I carry my wallet in my front, right pocket and my rock in my front left pocket, and usually end up with my handkerchief in my back right pocket, and my phone and pens in my front left pocket, these things are not tied to a daily ritual or routine. Most days in 2003 I did not even bother to pick up my wallet and rock at all; I was not leaving the property here, what did I need them with me for? I certainly don’t fill my pockets in any order, or think anything of picking up my phone first or my handkerchief last. I wear shoes just about every day, but sometimes I put them on right away, first thing and sometimes they wait until everything else is done (pockets full, whatever) and I’m about to walk out the door. I don’t even bother to wear clean clothes every day. Most days around here I’ll just be working with the same dirty stuff I was the day before, or something equally dirty, so as long as my clothes don’t pose a risk to any surface I sit on, I’ll just wear the same dirty clothes several days in a row. If I know I’m going “out” or going to Phoenix or the like, I’ll generally put on fresh, clean clothes and even change them daily, but otherwise, why bother? I mean, I wear clean underwear every day, right?

But I don’t always put my pants on first or my shirt on first. In fact, sometimes I have two shirts on before I get to underwear and other times I’ll have underwear, pants, socks, and shoes on, pockets full to boot, well before I think of putting a single shirt on.

Sometimes I go straight down to breakfast and other times I check my email first. Today I checked my email, and then instead of going to breakfast went to the post office and then had a chat with Becky… and THEN went to breakfast. When I go get the mail, which I do do almost every delivery day, I don’t always cross the road in the same place and I don’t always check the two PO Boxes in the same order. And I’m not aware of it making a difference to me. Sometimes while I wait for my email to download I’ll also try to read Modern Evil and/or other sites, but other times I’ll just sit patiently and watch the email download. Some days I forget to check my email completely. Some days I forget to check Modern Evil at all.

I like to read some Webcomics, and I have their bookmarks … sortof arranged by my preferences to them. But I don’t always read them in that order. Some days I’ll only read one or two of them. Some days I’ll read a whole bunch of them I haven’t looked at in a long while. Some days I remember to read The Hot Button, some days I don’t. When I haven’t, sometimes I bother to catch up, and sometimes I don’t.

Now, until this week, for about a year, most of my time has been planned by others, so it’s seemed random enough to me. I mean, I never knew what I’d be doing from one day to the next. And at night, since I’ve been trying to balance six creative drives against each other and the need to rest and relax and have fun, there has rarely been two nights in a row whose activities had anything to do with another.

I don’t post every night before I go to bed. I don’t always even put on my pajamas before I go to bed. I don’t pray before bed every day; I just pray whenever it occurs to me to do so, day or night, whatever, whenever. The closest thing to a ritual is that I do masturbate most nights after I lie down to sleep and before I fall asleep, but even that’s only … say, 7 out of 10 nights. If I was being graded on that ritual’s frequency, it would be a low ‘C’ at best.

Let’s see, what else… I certainly don’t shower every day. Or every week. In fact, I haven’t showered this year, yet. But … we’ll be digging a trench this weekend to bring the incoming water to the new bathroom, and maybe this week we’ll get the plumbing done and the hot water heater hooked up and then I’ll take a shower. I’m starting to itch.

Lately, with the (seemlingly depression-related) irregular wake-sleep schedule I’ve had, I don’t eat at chronologically regular times, either. And when I do eat, I don’t do it in any particular way. I mean, when I build a sandwich I generally start with the bread and work from there, but I don’t, for instance, always put the meat on before the cheese or always spread the peanut butter before the jelly. I tried working out a routine for frying eggs to get them cooked right and done at the same time as the toast, but my dad buys eggs by the 5-dozen from Sam’s Club, and they are remarkably low-quality eggs. No two eggs fry the same, or are the same size. So no formula can be applied for effeciency there. As my brother learned (and some of you already know), I don’t even always hold my fork in the same hand. Sometimes it switches back and forth in the same meal, sometimes it is left the entire meal, sometimes right. Depends on the circumstances.

I don’t brush my teeth at the same time, or in the same way, every day. I try to floss and brush my teeth at least once every day, usually right after the main meal of the day. But if I miss it, or if I start brushing the teeth on the left first instead of the right, or if I start brushing the interior surfaces or top teeth before the exterior or bottom, it’s no big deal, I just pay attention and be sure that every tooth in my mouth is thoroughly brushed. When I learned, many years ago, that I had several cavities, I started brushing every day, and when I learned three years ago that my gums were in bad shape, I added flossing. And usually I floss before I brush, so the brush can brush away the things the floss digs out or loosens, but … not always. And I don’t even remember to brush at all every day.

Hmmm… I try to routinely bring firewood up to my room before the sun sets, but that doesn’t always work.

There is a certain way I prefer to shower, but if I need to be faster or if I’m out of something or feel I need to actually follow the shampoo’s directions and repeat – hey, no big deal.

I’m trying to think of something …

I don’t usually go to the library on the same day of the week… or every week.

I don’t snooze my alarms the same number of times every day.

I don’t answer the phone the same way the every day … or change it every day, ritualisticly, either.

I haven’t attended any church more than on any lone Sunday since … 1997, it seems.

I don’t eat sandwiches the same way every time; sometimes I eat the around the edge first, sometimes I eat back and forth and back and forth like a machine, and sometimes I eat randomly.

Heck, when I masturbate I don’t even fantasize about the same things again and again. Sometimes I’m me, usually I’m not. Sometimes I’m someone I know, or with someone I know. Sometimes I’m male, sometimes I’m female, sometimes I’m something else entirely. Sometimes my partner is something else entirely. I’m all over the board. Sometimes I use lubes and/or toys, but usually I don’t. Certainly nothing that would make a noise with my brother on the other side of that wall, now. Usually I orgasm, but sometimes I don’t.

What else? I don’t always write in the same way. For blog entries, usually i type them right into the MT “New Entry” window, but sometimes I do it in a text editor and other times I do it on paper and then re-type it. No big deal, either way. For fiction, usually I prefer to get it down on paper for the first draft, but whether it’s longhand or typed out on one of my manual typewriters doesn’t matter to me. For longhand, there’s no special paper or special place or special pen, or even pen-color that I feel I need to use. No rituals to prepare myself for writing, either. For typewriters, I usually select one (I now own six manual typewriters; two Remington (my least-favorite), two Underwood (good, solid machines), one Smith-Corona (my favorite, and what I wrote 2003’s NaNoWriMo novel on), and one Olympia (a relatively late-model, it types in all script (ie: cursive)) based on how it performs and what I’m writing. The Olympia is not the typewriter for anything too masculine or formal, though it does have very good response. The Smith-Corona is an excellent, well-rounded machine, and perhaps my favorite. One of the Underwoods was my favorite before I got the Smith-Corona, but I have to press the keys much harder on the Underwood; the same number of keys stick on both machines, with the same frequency. The other Underwood is green, and I have never typed anything of length on it (I bought it for $4 at the local Thrift Store last month; I want to try it out this month for some short stories, see how it performs), so I don’t know much about it; no keys seem to stick. The Remingtons … well, their carriages don’t pull properly as I type and seem to have stickier keys. They are both in the store, for sale as antiques. Anyway, I select the typewriter for the job and use whatever paper is handy. I prefer computer paper over typing paper, for its weight; I like to be able to type on both sides of the page and not worry about tearing through the pages as I type quite energetically. But what paper I use is no big deal.

And the writing process is in now way formalized for me. Sometimes I outline first. Sometimes I work on index cards. Sometimes I’ll write a ‘treatment’ or summary first. Sometimes I’ll just dive in with no planning. The only one that seems to work better than any of the others is to just write without thought or plan, but I’m not sure that will work for some of my ideas (ie: anything requiring detailed research).

I don’t (think I) court different women the same way. I’ve tried a lot of things, but I’m not sure I’ve tried anything twice. Sometimes I go in with a plan, sometimes I’m all action, sometimes I’m all talk, sometimes I try to go with the flow, sometimes I try to balance all four, sometimes I just follow my heart, sometimes I try to instruct my heart, and on and on and … none of that seems to have worked. I mean, I sort of wish there was some sort of ritual I was following in relationships and such, so that there was something I could just stop doing. The only thing I know I try to do in every one is “just be myself”, but I have faith that that is not a misstep.

I’ve just noticed I seem to comb the right side of my hair before the left, when I comb it. Is that a ritual, or based on my right-handedness?

On rituals, generally:

I’ve been to a few weddings in recent years, and while that is a ritual I have long longed to have done myself, it was never the ritual that was important to me. It was having found someone who agreed to commit their life to me wholly, who loved me reciprocally, and it was the idea of all the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds that occurred after that ritual that has drawn me. I have done some research (not much lately, more back in ’96/’97 when I was engaged several times) on marriage and the ritual of marriage, and I know that the original point of the ritual was basically to ask the community’s blessing for two people who have already chosen to commit themselves to each other to continue to do so forever. The idea was that any two people so joined would have an impact on their community, so the community has a right and a say in whether or not two people are allowed to be together. Whether it is what is right, not just for those two, but for the entire community. And since in these days the idea of community and the actuality of community has changed so greatly from what it was when the ritual of the wedding ceremony was instituted, it is not a ritual that I place perhaps the same weight on as others. Not necessarily less weight, just different. When I am invited (or not invited) to a wedding, I see it as my inclusion (or exclusion) from the perceived community the bride and groom see themselves a part of, and I see it as my duty to do my part as a community member to decide whether the proposed marriage is good, not just for the two involved, but for their community. In at least one wedding I did what I could to try to voice my dissent, but it went ahead. And the marriage was dissolved less than a year later. (He is now much more rightly married, by the by, and I gave my full blessings on the subsequent wedding.) So, if the ritual of the wedding is about the community’s voice, and is supposed to be subsequent to the actual bride and groom having committed themselves one to the other in love and in life, then rather than look forward to getting married, ought one not look forward instead to finding someone they are willing and able to commit themselves wholly to for the rest of their lives, and who is willing and able to do the same, both in love? That’s what I do. And if the community doesn’t like it, I’ll find a new community. Bah.

Okay, back to me:

So, I guess I’m just not … ritualistic. I don’t want to consider myself “scattered”, but I’m certainly not in a rut of routine or ritual. I may be neurotic (ie: having the same stone in my left pants pocket for the last 15 years or so), but I’m not obsessive compulsive (I certainly don’t rub my rock or put it in my pocket in a certain order or at a certain time, or even every day; it’s just a rock I happen to have in my personal inventory most of the time).

Rituals have certain positive qualities in certain respects and for certain people at certain intervals and occurrances in life. Routines probably help people get the things done they mean to do regularly.

I just … don’t seem to work that way.

Just like I don’t seem to see or hear or think or communicate the way other people do. Some people (like my dad) can only see that difference as a bad thing, but I tend to see it as simply different.

Like, if it hasn’t been moved since the last time I used it or saw it get used, I can remember where just about anything in the world is, but if I’ve never used it and/or been told what it was/was for while it was right in front of me, I’m likely never to see it at all, even looking for it, even if I’m looking right at it, and even with an excellent description. And I don’t seem to remember things I don’t know of a reason specific to the thing to remember it. For instance, on the drive to Pine from Phoenix (or the drive to Phoenix from Pine), as a passenger there are about two hours of time in which I spend the bulk of it simply gazing out the windows at the passing countryside. I have done this trip hundreds of times, dozens of them in the last 11 months, at least. And yet there is not a landmark or feature on the entire journey that I could recognize, remember, or recall if asked. I might be able, if blindfolded and instantly teleported to a random location on the route, even without signs, to recognize that I was on the 87 somewhere, but I wouldn’t be able to point at a hill or mountain or small town and tell you what it was called. Or if you mentioned the name of any of the things that dot the path, I wouldn’t know it was on the path. Or if you described in detail a feature or landmark on the path that I had surely seen literally hundreds of times before, I would not know what you were referring to at all. Now, there are three things I can think of on that route that I could definitely identify (aside from Payson itself, the town where I was born; that is reason enough for me to remember it), perhaps on my own, and perhaps even remember or recall. Mt. Ord and the town of Rye, because my father has mentioned them on not less than half a dozen trips while we were in clear view of them, and because we’ve stopped in Rye at least once. And (only on the trip from Pine to Phoenix, not the other way, it seems) the Mazatzal Mountains, because on nearly every trip to Phoenix with my grandmother, she recognizes them and talks about them for the twenty or thirty minutes when they are in clear view. My dad told me on the phone, as he drove home, that he was “at Sunflower”, but I don’t know where that is. I’m vaguely aware that it is a town, because of the context and past context where it was used, but the only town-like entity I ever saw between Fountain Hills and Payson was Rye. So, err… whatever. I just don’t see the same way he does. There are dozens of little creekbeds on that road, but I couldn’t tell one from another. There are hills you go up and hills you go down and long valleys and …. and … I don’t know. I could look at it again and again and again, and never notice the details my dad thinks it’s a crime for me to miss. He actually started to get angry with me the other night because I didn’t know what tree he was talking about when he pointed at the forest and said “they cut that tree down!” WHAT!?!? Now I’m supposed to memorize every tree in the forest, and if I can’t remember each one I’m unobservant? Sigh.

This is sortof coming on the heels of last weekend. My brother and I wanted to go for a hike. My father grew up in this area and (theoretically) knows the ups and downs and ins and outs and fronts and backs of all the hills and mountains in the area. So my brother and father and I were standing outside and I point at the highest thing to the North and say, half-joking as I have been the entire year since I have yet to that point to go on a single hike, that we would like to go climb it. Heath agrees. My father and I, both pointing at the same thing, this huge thing reaching into the northern sky, discuss it briefly and he seems to regard it as an easy thing. I ask him the best way to approach it, and he gives my brother and I directions to it, and, we assume to a path up it. He then takes up about an hour of our time with lifting and shuffling and moving things about before sending us on our way, again, seeming as though it will be no trouble to go to the top of it and get back before the sun sets in just over two hours. Okay. We get a bottle of water and some sandwiches and put on our new boots and head out. Neither of us has any hiking experience.

We follow dad’s directions exactly and start into the forest right where he said we should. There appears only to be animal trails. Nothing regularly or recently walked by humans. We follow the animal trails until they run out, then forge ahead, generally toward our target and still not off dad’s directions. After about 75 minutes we not the time and that while we should clearly turn back if we mean to get home in time for supper, we have not yet reached the part of the land that really begins to slope upward more than a little, and it looks, from what we can see, that we are not even half of the distance to the foot of the mountain we are headed for. But, there is a ridge ahead, and we decide to try to get to the top of the ridge before we head back. It doesn’t look far.

There is no apparent way to get onto the ridge from our approach, so we try to flank it. Dad calls around this time and asks if he should put our spaghetti on to boil, or wait. I tell him clearly that we will not be back any time soon, that it will be a long time. He doesn’t seem to think twice about this. Before we get to the elevation of the ridge, two hours have passed and we decide to stop for a moment. We eat our sandwiches. It looks like we are close to the ridge, so we press on. Before long we have passed a couple of points that would be more difficult on the way down than they were on the way up, and the journey is becoming more and more steep. We notice that we are now, somehow, looking down on the ridge we were approaching from below. As we notice that the sun is getting very close to the mountain to the west (just as high as the one we are climbing), we decide that since it won’t get dark for nearly half an hour after the sun disappears (the sky is a little weird around here), we will try to get to the top. Not having seen any clear trails on the way up, we have become more and more sure that there will be a visible trail on the way down, and even if it is in the dark, following a trail will be easier than climbing under and around and through trees and over boulders and around cacti, which is what we had been doing the entire way up.

It got dark a lot faster than I expected it to, and the top seemed to believe in Zeno’s Paradox. I could see that we were getting closer and closer, but it seemed to take longer and longer to go shorter and shorter distances the further up we went. So, at a certain point when I could see what appeared in the growing dark to be a reasonably fast route down and more directly toward the lights of the city, we turned away from the summit and began the steep slide down. I knew we had made mistakes. I knew we should have turned back after an hour. I knew we should have taken a flashlight. But hindsight is 20/20. More than I was upset with myself, at first, I was upset with my father for not communicating better. He didn’t tell us where a trail was or how to find one, he didn’t set our expectations as to how long it would take to go where we pointed, and he didn’t say word one about what to take with us. Now, I have been living in the desert long enough to know that it’s pretty dumb to go out without water, so that was a no-brainer. And I knew I wasn’t going to walk more than half a day in any direction, so I only took two litres. Actually, I wasn’t counting on walking more than a couple of hours. For the five-hour hike I ended up on, a gallon or more would have been wise, between the two of us. And we had turned around after roughly two and a half hours. Which, yes, I know, was half an hour after we should have been back with proper planning, but hey. We’re inexperienced kids who have basically never hiked before. What do we know? We asked the local expert and thought we got the right information.

Still, after about half an hour down, after I found my ass full of pricks from the prickly-pear cactus it found as I slipped down a particularly precarious drop, my attitude began to change. A mild and continuous anxiety attack kicked in and I started finding all the ways to blame myself. I should have assumed that my dad didn’t know what he was talking about and been more prepared. I should have assumed my dad’s taking the idea of the hike lightly had nothing to do with the actual difficulty of the hike. I should have turned us around sooner. I should have thought to bring a flashlight. I should have thought to bring warmer clothes. I should have found a compass. I should not have sat on that cactus. Frankly though, I couldn’t see it in the near-total darkness.

Since we didn’t have a flashlight, I was using my cellphone as a flashlight. It does have a bright display, but not enough light to stimulate more than the rods of my eyes (ie: Black and White vision at best), and it only illuminated about four feet in front of me. After not very much of this, and remembering that it had not-too-long-ago been a full moon, I called my dad to ask him when the moon would be coming out.

This was my real mistake.

By this time we had been our nearly three and a half hours, over an hour of that after all the sun’s light had disappeared, and my dad had apparently not thought once about our well-being.

But after that call, he spent the next two hours apparently hectic about us. He wanted to know where we were, how we could be so lost. I don’t think we were lost, and we certainly didn’t feel lost at the time. We were just out in the woods in the dark and wanted to know if perhaps the moon would be coming out soon enough that we could just sit down and wait for it to light our way. At that point we were still high enough that we could see lights of the town from the highway out of town to the South all the way up to the base of the mountain. So when he asked “what lights do you see”, the only response I knew to give him was “all of them, we can see the entire town.” And when he asked if we could see the highway we replied as honestly and clearly as we could that we could see the part the went through the center of town, but that the part nearest us, perpendicular to the direction of our travel, we had not seen since about a minute into our hike; it is completely obscured by trees the entire way up. On half a dozen calls that night, he kept asking variations of those same two questions. He came out in his car and was driving up and down the highway, honking his horn, asking if we could hear his horn, and we couldn’t hear his horn or traffic or anything. If we were moving, we could hear our feet crunching under us, but standing still it was just silence.

Not long after the first call, and before the second when he said he was coming out to find us, we found a wash or stream-bed down the hill and began to follow it. It was uphill to our left and uphill to our right and downhill ahead of us and we hadn’t crossed the top, so I knew we were heading in vaguely the right direction, no matter how the stream curved. From there on out we didn’t leave the stream-bed until we reached civilization, and we basically didn’t have any trouble, either. Manzanita and other tricky, thick brush doesn’t seem to grow well in streams, so the path seemed remarkably clear and fast. Dad kept calling and asking questions and looking for us and we couldn’t figure out why no matter how many features we described and how we answered his questions, he didn’t know where we were. And worse, even though I knew we were surely on our way out safely, he wouldn’t trust me and let us just walk down the stream-bed to civilization and home.

We weren’t hurt (not really, no broken bones or even sprains) or lost, we just over-did it. It didn’t occur to me that asking if the moon would be coming out soon would put him into such a tizzy, or we wouldn’t have called. A better flashlight would have been nice, but we got along okay with my cellphone, obviously. I think I have one more prick stuck in my left leg at this point, but I can’t see it to deal with it, so I’m hoping my body’s natural defences get rid of it soon. We got home about five hours after we set out and learned upon long discussion and then more looking during the daytime that apparently we just can’t communicate well with our father.

My brother and I had stood in the same place and pointed the same direction and understood the same thing, and my dad had understood something completely different.

See, there is this tiny hill between here and the mountain Heath and I were pointing at. Houses run right up to it and from what I know now, roads lead right up to it and there’s a rock stairway right up one side. My dad, looking for us on it, went up and down one side on foot, drove around it, and went up and down the other side of it on foot, and drove around it again, all in under half an hour. Perhaps twenty minutes. It is so close and so small that I had not even noticed it. It had not occurred to me that someone might say they were “going on a hike” and take two litres of water and sandwiches if they planned on walking over a tiny hill. My brother had also apparentl never even noticed the hill. Not in the foreground of the mountain we were pointing at.

Which is, apparently, part of “The Rim”. But no one had ever told us that.

Or that it’s about two thousand feet higher than where we started, and that it’s a five-mile hike just to get to it, and certainly not something one attempts to start in the afternoon, unprepared.

No, why mention that?

In a year here, in my entire life of living and visiting this place, no one had mentioned that to me. Or my brother, apparently.

So, err… since my dad apparently didn’t know what the directions he had given us were, and certainly didn’t know where we had ended up, he couldn’t find us and the answers we gave to his questions didn’t make sense to him. But in the long talks we had about it on later days, he was upset at me for not seeing, not hearing, not communicating, the way he expected us to. And it was all on me, though Heath and I agreed we saw and heard the same things, and if the phone had been in Heath’s hands, dad would have received the same answers.

I didn’t see the hill, I didn’t see the highway, I could see the lights of the town but couldn’t communicate to him what they looked like effectively. I couldn’t hear the traffic, I couldn’t hear his car horn, I couldn’t hear (or see) the airplane that he says flew overhead. I didn’t understand the distance between here and there, between down and up, I couldn’t see the size of buildings from on the mountain and (I don’t know if he’s actually doing math in his head or what) know how far I was from them in miles, yards, feet, anything. Upon closer examination/discussion, neither Heath nor I could guess, even on flat ground, how far a mile is with any accuracy. Well, Heath a little better than I. And he couldn’t understand it. Or how I could get around in the city. ANd I can’t understand it either, because I consider myself to have pretty good navigational skills… of places that I know. And I know how to read maps and signs and I have a keen memory for things I understand and understand why I should remember them, and that’s always been enough. And if I can’t tell 3/4 of a mile from a mile and a half, so what? If I’ve got to get from here to there, I’m going to go, no matter how far it is. Why does distance matter more than location? Sigh.

At least when I repeated to dad what his directions had been, and that we had simply followed them, he understood, instantly, exactly where we had been and gone.

Does that mean he gave us bad directions? Hard to say. He spent several minutes clarifying that the words he’d said weren’t what he’d meant for us to do, but then again, he seemed to feel that we ought to have simply known.

I’m getting tired. Somewhere around two hours ago I was thinking about wrapping this up and going to bed. Then somewhere around an hour ago I began to think that I might just try to stay up all night and all day and perhaps get my sleep schedule in order that way.

See, I took a sleeping pill last night, right? And I had multiple wake-up calls this morning. (Thanks, Heath, Iain, etc…) And I had four different, staggered alarms, each with individual snoozes. And I know that at 7:30AM, when I was first awakened, I felt refreshed and well-slept and could have gotten up. In fact, did get up, peed, and then laid back down again. And stayed in bed until … Well, frankly until about ten minutes after my dad and grandparents left for Phoenix. Which was just after Noon. And I lolly-gagged around and checked my email and looked at a couple of websites and went and got the USMail and chatted with Becky and had some breakfast and when I finally got to my sanding, it was … well, 2:45PM. I did not, certainly not, get a “full day” of work in. Mostly I just … wandered around, feeling bad or laid around, feeling bad. Then after an hour’s work, Heath was home so I took a break. And then got back to work, but not for more than thirty minutes before I stopped again, for supper. And after supper we worked for another hour (my longest workday this year (on furniture, anyway – don’t get me started on working on installing a septic system) was only 2.5hrs of actual work) before we stopped again. That time mostly due to cold, but for me also due to the fact that I literally didn’t know how to do what I need to do next. So, err… not the most productive day.

So, trying to go backwards with my sleep schedule didn’t work. And I can’t remember it ever working for me before, either. But going forward has. It just … takes so much longer. Usually. I haven’t been able to successfully push my sleep schedule more than … 8 to 12 hours at a push. Which … based on the last week, would have me going to bed at three in the afternoon and waking up at midnight. At the best. Or going to bed at eleven AM and waking up at 8PM, which would perhaps be the least useful to the household in general and the least conducive to work, considering the heat cost of working at night. But, here I go anyway, pushing forward. Hoping that I can stay up all day Saturday, I guess, and go to bed … early, probably, Saturday night, and then … hopefully, waking up “early” on Sunday. But who knows. Even if that works, what will happen AFTER that.

Or maybe I should go take a nap.

I should be writing fiction. I just looked; this is approaching (surpassing) 6000 words. This could have been a short story. This could have been a chapter or two of a novel. This could have been several hours’ sleep.

This could have been a love letter.

But every time I start writing those, I end up with disappointment, heartache.

If I were one of Pavlov’s dogs, I’d learn not to write love letters, not to show affection, not to seek out companionship.

Too bad I wasn’t born a dog.