Check it Off Check it Off Check it Off
I made this list last night when yet again I could NOT find the way to Dreamland.
The Melatonin hadn’t worked, any more than that super-mild,over-the-counter sleep aid.
The first little glass of warm milk hadn't, any more than that second glass fortified with an ounce of whiskey.
Insomnia ruled.
SOOO I dragged out a legal pad and a pen and went into the bathroom, turning the lights way up; I figured if I couldn't sleep then I'd just out and out embrace wakefulness, dammit.
A quick look in the mirror showed a female Scrooge from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, just after he sees the scariest ghost of all.
Then I tried my last resort of a remedy, which is getting into a bath so scalding my vision begins to ebb.
That part worked.
The overhead light was pulsing, brighter and then less bright, brighter and then less bright, every time the blood from my heart rounded the bend at my toes and fingers and started back. It was cool and scary, like what happens to the lady in Requiem for a Dream.
I finally pulled myself out of that hot scented hallucination factory and toweled off. I wrapped myself in my big old robe, cracked a window for that nice bite of cold night air and sat down on the toilet's closed lid to make this list.
When you have insomnia, your mind feels to you like that guy’s mind in the movie Limitless. I even looked in the mirror again to see if my eyes had maybe turned ultra-blue like Bradley Cooper’s kept doing all through the movie. (Nope. Now I looked like I'd just been visited by the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come with Tiny Tim dead alas dead and the rest of the family perishing entirely and Scrooge just knows it's all his fault.)
It didn't matter how I looked. What mattered is what I would plan for the day ahead.
I had my legal pad my pen and my just-won't-quit mind. I made this list.
And when I got done I was suddenly limp with sleepiness.
I did sleep then, from 3:30 until 7:30 when the sound of schoolchildren at the bus stop dragged me back to the waking world.
Four hours; it isn't enough.
Looking at the tasks on the list now, even thinking how great it would be to polish them all off I know I don't have much chance of doing that - not unless I crawl back under the covers and sleep one more hour.
If I do, I bet I can check off every single task here named, and in jig time too, because because because, as I have been amazingly slow to learn, there is just no sub- sub- substitute for a good night’s rest.
