I woke up at 7:24 this morning, six minutes before my alarm goes off. It was another night of insomnia, which seems to have gotten worse as I've gotten older. I sleep for about three hours at a time, wake up for half an hour then go back to sleep. I've tried to create a schedule so that I can go to sleep, wake up, go back to sleep and wake up just twice a night. I suppose six hours of sleep is enough. It's not so much the interruption in my sleep that bothers me, it's more what I do in that half hour. I have a night stand with an enclosed cubby, my treasure trove of snacks, that I dig into while in that 30 minute waking time. I'll snack on something, have a cigarette, turn on my TV and find the most bizarre programming that television has to offer. What I really want to do is get up and write, however, I know that once I do that, going back to sleep is not an option. I get so wrapped up in what I'm working on that before I know it, 7:30 a.m. rolls around and it's time to prepare for work.
Yes, I still punch a clock. I have a half hour drive to work, then it's nine hours of the grind, a half hour back home, walk the dog, feed the cats, do a few chores...you get the idea. I'm exhausted, physically and mentally. All during that nine hour grind, I'm thinking about sitting at home emptying my brain of all the things I want to pour out onto the screen. That depresses me, because I have to work, I'm part of the machine in that respect.
This morning, I saw two turkey vultures on the side of the road. Ugly damn creatures. They were feasting on road kill, someone's cat probably, that they'd carried from the middle of the street onto the lush green grass. What struck me most about that scene was that they were devouring the carrion in the front yard of an at least 1.5 million dollar house. How's that for irony. Okay, so there might not be a lot of meaning in that for my readers, but it sure struck a cord in me. I actually saw myself as that carrion with the corporate machine stabbing it's beak into my rotting flesh, greedily devouring my dreams.
I wanted to go back home and write. It really is my salvation.
