Sleeping Dogs
Tranquility, yes. I could not fall asleep last night. My friend’s place was eerily quiet after lights out, and I heard something I had almost forgotten about: Wind through the trees, creaking limbs, absence of traffic. Plus I had forgotten my anti-depressants at home, the ones that make me nice and sleepy. At 2 o’clock in the morning I turned on some Beethoven to play in the background, and the dogs regarded me wearily, woken again by my restless movements. Strange scenes flashed repeatedly when my eyes closed; me hissing something like “It’s either me or the dogs” to my boss, to which she dryly replied, “We work at an animal shelter”; bitchy alcoholics cornering me in a church basement, upset at how I was running the meeting; erotic encounters with Ski spliced with a dinner conversation in which I say to him, “I’m not really your type, am I?”. Sigh.
Catching up on my class reading last night; Scott Russel Sander’s memories of his drunk father, Mary McCarthy’s accidental brush with Communism, Richard Rodriguez’s portrait of San Francisco in the 1980′s, the facades of Victorian homes and the growing absence of gay men. I’m not worthy. I think again; so many wonderful writers I haven’t yet read, who am I to think I could do this, my words are immature, derivative. In choppy times the sullen critic gains ground, doubts trail after him like shrieking ghosts in my head, emptying the meaning from my life. He likes it when I lose sleep.
