A Few Thoughts...

I've been up all night working.

Working is reading (right now, mainly Duma Key). Working is cruising the web, many times looking hard into the ugliness in the world -- an act that can be quite exhausting on its own for a person who is any sort of artist at all. Working is writing.

Working is imagining, daydreaming (in my case, mostly at night).

So now the time is approaching for me to go to bed.

I take with me all the ghosts of the world. I take the memories of mangled and dying people. I take the memories of funny animals. I take the memories of scenes from a novel -- Duma Key. I take the memories of my interactions with people on the web.

I climb into bed, in a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt, and continue to read from a book until my eyelids grow heavy and my eyes begin to dry out. While most other people in this part of the world are interacting in offices, on the streets, over the phone, on the internet, I slip into the world of dreams.

The Freudian Dreamworks creak into motion and everything I've seen is mixed into a sort of reality/fictive lasagna.

"I have to get going on this novel," I think, as I fall asleep. "I'm 41 years old, living with uncontrolled diabetes, high cholesterol, and I'm more sedentary than a sea slug. I don't have much time before my body gives in and I go to sleep for good. I've got to finish this thing and move on to the next one."

All the while the world goes on about its business.

People are born, as I sleep. People die.

And, in a while, their ghosts wander through my dreamworks ... as even more people work in jobs they hate, jobs they love, as they hide themselves away during lunch and make love, as mother's give birth, as sons die in wars and children die in crimes all over the world.

I sleep ... perchance ... to-- Oh, what the hell. Are you still reading this?

I'm off to bed -- with the lights on, thank you very much.