Oh To Be Awake

Pee, brush teeth, comb hair, and I’m good to go most mornings. No need for coffee or other brew, perhaps add 30 minutes of ignoring me, but I’ll promise, that’s it, I’ve turned into a more or less pleasant person ready to interact with the world.

Last night I discovered that it takes totally different skills to wake up at night. And here I thought all I had to do is reach for a book or the iPad to make me sleepy again.

The decision was to reach for a book: Justin Cronin’s The City of Mirrors. Fiction, the third in a series. The other option would’ve been Heather Ann Thomson’s Blood in the Water, The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy.

City of Mirrors introduced a new character from back in the 1960s and even mentioned Attica which amazed me and reinforced my belief in the synchronicity of life. Justin Cronin also amazed me by the meticulous research he must have done of that period. I kept wondering when the fiction part of the book would kick in, realizing that I didn’t know enough about this history to even notice. I plodded on. But it didn’t keep my interest and that chapter never connected to the plot in a way I could relate.

I closed the book and put it down and that’s when I realized, looking at the cover, that I’ve actually been reading Blood in the Water, about Attica.

My state of awareness in the middle of night might take some hair and teeth brushing, too.

With all these sign of pointing to confusion at my age, there is always the worry of dementia that comes in many versions. But like all the other signs, I’ll ignore this for now. The possibly obvious still rests under a blanket of plausible excuses. Let’s go with that.

There have been tons of health issues that kept me from interacting with my world here. Instead I’ve been working on pussyhats and other knitting. The Trump election has me confused and angry. The coming Saturday’s demonstration or march in Sacramento is therefore very welcome.