...In the middle of the night...
O'wait! It's not that time yet, is it?

Well, yup, it is, kinda. My sleeping pattern is all f**ked up, so I'm trying to get aligned. So I'm staying up all night.

And it's tough. Real tough. There's a nice warm bed and a nice warm wife waiting for me in the bedroom. But I can't go there... I need to be able to sleep all day, and that means staying up all night. And I have to go by the Post Office after 08:00, so I'd better stay up past then at least.

And I like being awake during the night. I think that I've mentioned this before and I will probably mention it again. I can go out on the porch and not hear anything but the rain, and the trucks on the interstate two miles away.

O'yeah, and the goddamn dogs barking. One thing that I love about cats is that they never bark all night long. There is evidently someone in the neighborhood with a new pup, and he's been left out in the rain and cold. And his owner is a good sleeper.

We have a stray cat that Karen has been feeding lately, and he wants to come in and live in our basement. No, sez I, a thousand times NO! But it's cold and raining, so I get a box out of the basement and put it on the back deck for him. He's relatively happy, at least he quit mewling when I went out to smoke.

No people are awake yet hardly. You know, that's what f**ks up the world: people. No, religion doesn't really enter into this, even though religious people can f**k up the world faster than smart people, there are so many people working on it that it doesn't make any difference. I think that people were f**king up the world even before there was language, much less religion.

And they're all doing it on purpose, too, for their own selfish satisfaction and comfort. Places to live, food to eat, cars to drive, computers to play with, TV to entertain them... each and every one of these things, and everything else that makes us civilized, takes its' toll.

The only way to stop that is to have fewer people. This isn't practical in the real sense, so I have to fake it.

I can pretend that the people aren't there, because I don't see them.

Ah, s**t, I can't even fool myself.

I do have daydreams (even when I'm up all night, I have daydreams. Is that really funny, or is it just me? No, wait, don't tell me....) that there is some mysterious malady that kills everyone who is sleeping and leaves those who are awake alone. Of course, I have to be working when this happens, or I might be asleep and therefore dead too, so I couldn't have this dream...

And the logistics would be really hard to figger out... this malady would have to travel the earth during a single rotation, always focused on midnight or whatever... if it didn't, it might kill all of the nighttime people, including me, and nobody would ever know what happened or if indeed anything had happened at all. Until the night-shift workers didn't show up...

Hmmm... starting to get goofy. I love that word goofy. It just so perfectly describes a mood... one in which I find myself frequently.

Well... time to make more coffee. I can go to bed in about 5 hours, so that means that I can drink coffee for an hour, then Karen will drink the rest of it when she wakes up...

Maybe more later.... maybe, I sez...