It’s after midnight again, and despite having no real reason to be awake this late anymore, here I am– my laptop actually resting on my lap, likely irradiating my groin with some isotope of Cesium or Strontium or whatever the hell Apple-chemists use to give me a few extra screen lumens or a few extra minutes of battery life.
I grew up as one of 8 people living in a house with two bedrooms and one bathroom. The concept of “Peace & Quiet” was foreign to me until I was old enough to start hanging out at other friends’ houses (we didn’t call them “play dates” like some postmodern overdetermined pretense for facilitating executive functioning in adolescents)…and only then, did I realize that such a frivolity was not available to me.
…Unless I stayed up late. Then–and only then–the house was relatively quiet for a few brief hours. My first forays into the dark half of the day were met with the chagrin of my mom. “Go to bed!” she would bellow, and I generally complied for a while. After a few months or years (does it matter which?) I tried to pass-off that I had reading for school, or that I was writing something, or that I was finishing up some self-imposed extracurricular task like drawing or crocheting or organizing a collection of baseball cards. And it wasn’t until my early teens that I built up the nerve to explain to my mom the “why” behind my nocturnal proclivities.
In one of those touching (but sickening) moments of teen-rebellion, I remember explaining to my mom that late night was the only time the house was quiet… it was the only time I could actually walk to the bathroom and not find someone in there as well as someone waiting. There was time to think, there were no little brothers to interrupt me, to bother me, to distract me from whatever important nothings I had going at any given time.
Amazingly, mom seemed to get it, and just let me be. Since that day, I generally don’t get more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night. I just haven’t much had the need for it (my doctor says otherwise, but that’s his job) and besides, I get a lot done. Like microblogging for a micro-following. It’s a start.
And now, a good 30 years from that moment of self-advocacy and assertiveness with my mom, I’m still up, surrounded by a panoply of random things. Looking around the room, from left to right, I see:
- two kid’s bikes
- a karaoke machine
- the vacuum cleaner
- a plastic bin of Legos
- a doll house
- a folded up gymnastics mat
- a couple of school backpacks and a sequin-bedazzled lunch box
- a third bike
- a cat carrier
- three Nerf guns, a sweatshirt, and an X-Box One remote in a pile on the floor
- a HydroFlask knock-off (Thermoflask???)
And where are all these treasures? What episode of Hoarders garage am I currently sitting in to type this poor barrage of syntactical jibberish and stream-of-consciousness nonsense?
My living room. The room we live in. In that building… place… where our beds and TV…. is.
Surrounded by all this stuff, pulled inside by my kids and left where it fell when I announced (I’m paraphrasing, here) **Oh shit, we got Scouts in ten minutes– get to the car!** — I can’t help but laugh a little at the psychosis of it all. But there’s no disconnect from external realities, here… even if my alternate narratives buried deep inside the onion layers of my soul (which, in turn, more closely resembles a severely charred Thomas’ English Muffin that an ethereal vessel of spiritual elucidation) don’t necessarily match my outward “Know your audience” routine to facilitate relative normalcy between dawn and down-for-the-night of everyone else under this roof.
This is my celebratory normal. This is my appointed place to mark the regular passage of regular time. Highs and lows and hobbies and habits and choices and responsibilities and engagement and efficacy… they all blend together in an eclectic–perhaps quixotic–dance of ordinary, everyday normal life. And what do I want?
To beat a dead horse (or the words of a dying Southern gentleman-turned-gambler, “It seems my hypocrisy knows no bounds.”
All the same, I guess I should get to bed. Lucid dreaming while you’re awake is another psychological thing altogether, and despite needing so little of it, I do like sleep.
That’s where I’m a Viking.
El Gigante Picante del Monte 