bed time

Okay, day shift. The planet is yours for the next 8 hours. Don't fuck it up or burn it down. Try not to wake me up unless someone is bleeding.

8 hours the hard way

I'm removed morning from my day. It seemed like the smartest thing to do. 37 years of attempting to sleep from night to day made no changes in my hard-wiring. When the opportunity presented itself to rearrange my schedule to suit my nature, lord, I jumped on it.

To bed at six, as false dusk greets the fishermen and the breakfast chefs. Up around two, as the rest of town begins that long, post-long snooze into evening. Right now, instead of hitting a snooze button and trying to come up with some way to finagle another 5 hours of sleep, I am just thinking of heading to bed. Lord love a duck, it's a beautiful life.

11:23 pm and I have too many books

Time to sweep the shelves. I've got more books than room, some of them dating back to grade school. Time to ditch a few, box them up and release them into the wild. Maybe take the cleanest down to the local used bookstore and swap them for yet more books.

Mercedes Lackey and her horse stories for lonesome and misunderstood teens: gone. Piers Anthony and his bad puns and inappropriate sex: gone. Thomas Harris, Dean Koontz, Elizabeth Peters, all those middling novels bought at Goodwill to pass a lunch hour: outta here.

Honestly, I'm keeping most of them. I have hopes of passing Harriet the Spy and Sport and the Oz books (both Baum and Thompson) and Rascal and so on along to my nephews as they grow and learn to love reading. I'll always keep plenty of paperback sf around to reread when I want something familiar or a fiend mentions needing something to read on a trip. The classics - Shakespeare, Twain, Kipling, Eliot, Lewis - stay because what use is a library without them?

I dream of a time when I have room to line the walls with books. A time when I do not have to stack them in double layers, hiding titles. When it would be practical to keep them alphabetically instead of wherever they fit. That day is not today. But every box I tote out of here helps.

Hey, want a book?

3:34 am is a good time to call it a day.

I've met with a fellow student about the TCC Literary Magazine's layout. I have played D'n'D with friends. I have eaten a little venison. I have rewatched True Romance. I have enjoyed a short hailstorm from the comfort of my living room.

I've put together two rounds for this week's trivia. I have fed the cat to prevent her from killing me. I've touched base with my mom. I've touched base with friends. I have looked for ice cream trucks for sale on craigslist.

I've used up my Sunday and I think it's time to go to bed.

7:51 and it's still raining.

Has been all day.

A few years ago, North Florida went through a nasty summer drought. Every day I would wake up and check the weather station while I got ready for work. Every day it showed me seven days of grinning, taunting cartoon suns. All the plants died. Even the live oaks, with their deep, behemoth roots, drooped.

That's just not right for this part of the world. Florida is a swamp, a rain forest. They called it the Sunshine State to attract tourists, but a better name would be the Mildew State. The whole ecology depends on on just staying damp all the time. Turns out, so do I.

I started to get depressed. And I am not prone to depression. All those clear blue skies began to weigh on me. I fantasized about storms, about standing out in my yard and letting big, fat raindrops beat on me.  Every read the Ray Bradbury story All Summer in a Day? That opposite of that.

Eventually, frowning clouds showed up on the weather channel and we got some rain, thank god. I don't think I've complained about rain since then, though.

12:04 and trivia is over.

At least until tomorrow, when I do it all over again at Corner Pocket. I've been running bar trivia nights for almost 2 and a half years now. I have to say, as a side job it sure beats digging ditches. Right now, though, my Monday night crowd is slowly fading away. Are they tired? Bored? Some come on another night now, at another time. Some just disappeared.

I have to come up with more of a crowd. If there's no competition, what fun is it? I should promote a little heavier, come up with fun new rounds. Somewhere there is an untapped crowd, and I need to entice them down to answer unimportant questions and drink more than they should on Monday.

At 8:14, I am putting on boots.

When I was young - five? - I would drag the toes of my sneakers on the ground. I liked the sound, I think. It wore through them quickly, and my mom hated it. "I'm going to make you wear steel toed boots," she would threaten. Yeah.

Don't throw me in that brier patch.

They take some getting used to, heavy boots. Takes some practice to steer them. They swing your foot a little further and widen your stride. Not for nothing, the fairy tale trope of seven-league boots.

I get mine at the flea market. It takes a few shows, some jumping up and down on a concrete floor, to break down the last guy's wear patterns and imprint my own.