;)
The closing credits to the movie, Rum Diary, with Johnny Depp, based on the work of Hunter S Thompson, photographed with my iPhone just before Margie and I left the theatre.
Today I had one of the strangest dreams ever. It began close to noon and lasted until about 2:30 pm, although it was interrupted three, maybe four times, by phone calls, but after each call it resumed.
I am trying to remember what time I got up this morning, but it is unclear to me. Was it 7:00? 8:00? 9:00? It was somewhere in that stretch. There was a piece of work that I had to do first thing so I did it, but the whole time I had the feeling that my density was increasing, that I was becoming heavier and heavier and pretty soon my weight would crush the chair beneath me and I would fall to the floor, then through the floor, then into the earth and I would not stop falling until I reached the molten core.
That is the feeling of pure exhaustion, sleepiness, sleep denied.
I had to sleep, so I left my desk, left my office, walked through the near corner of the garage into the living room and then lay down on the couch. It is kind of funny - if I am in my bed, I cannot lie on my back at all. It just aggravates my shingles too much and leaves me no hope of sleep. There is only one position that I can lie on in bed and that is on my right side, tilted towards the front.
The shingles start on the left side of my back, pretty close to my spine, wrap around through my left armpit and across my chest in an ugly, dark-red, mottled, blistered band that seems to range between three and four inches in width and then stops right on my sternum.
I cannot lie on my left side at all. So I hold that one position on my right side, all through the night. I do not sleep through the night, but only in brief periods - but that's good, because before I started taking the drugs I couldn't really sleep at all.
Oddly enough, I can lie on my back on the couch. I think it has something to do with the pillows that I put beneath me and how they position me. It still hurts my back to lie like that, but I can handle it.
So that is what I did. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. The cats, Jim and Chicago, happily came to join me. Both wanted to step all over my chest until they could find just the right spot to curl up and nap with me, but I refused to let them. I kept picking them up and pushing them down to my legs. Finally, they got the idea. One settled down on my thighs, the other in the gap between my calves.
Then I closed my eyes, fell asleep almost instantly and began to dream. Margie had the TV on - tuned to the news channels. Even as I slept and dreamed, I could hear and was cognisant of every word and sentence that came from the TV. I followed the conversation, but as I did, in my dream I was in the midst of a big crowd in a warm and sunny place and there were green trees and flowers and stores. It was not Alaska. Maybe it was in the tropics somewhere - but it looked American, so maybe not. Florida? Arizona? Puerto Rico? People were talking, people were waving their arms - others were driving cars and motorcycles; airplanes kept flying by, low to the ground, so low that I could see the faces of the pilots.
Dogs ran past, barking.
Many more things were happening.
All this - the conversation, the shouts, the pumping of pistons, the spinning of props, the barking of dogs was taking place in complete silence. I could hear no voices, no engines, no props roaring, no dogs barking. The activity before me was furious and mouths were flapping - in silence, making no sound whatsoever.
Picture a lady with curly red hair tied back with a checkered kerchief, standing two feet away from me, looking right at me, the motion of her mouth, lips and teeth telling me that she was talking loudly but not a sound came from her.
As her jaws worked, what I heard was Rick Perry, saying "oops!" I could hear, understand and follow everything that was coming from the TV. Perry, Herman Cain, Romney, the recent horrors at Penn State and a whole lot of serious nonsence being debated by left-wingers and right-wingers, with a moderate or two thrown in for the heck of it.
And then the phone would ring and I would want to ignore it but there were critical matters pending, so I would take the phone and someone would say I should donate money here and someone else asked for John and I told him he had the wrong number, there is no John here and he said are you sure and then someone called wanting to use some of my pictures in something - and each time I fell back to sleep at practically the moment I put the phone down. The dream resumed as if it had never stopped and once again I was perfectly following the dialogue from the TV as the cats napped happily upon my legs.
Then a call came about a completely unexpected matter that absolutely had to be dealt with immediately and so I disrupted the cats, staggered into my office to my computer, talking on the phone, trying to grasp the pertinent details and then I opened the appropriate software and began to type and calculate but kept making mistakes and a task which should have taken maybe ten minutes at most took me about half-an-hour.
Had that not happened, I think perhaps I would have lay on the couch dreaming a silent dream as I followed everything that was actually happening around me for another two, three, four, six, ten, hours or so.
Maybe it was the Vicodin.
;)
This is what pushed me into a state of such exhaustion and stress that I wound up getting shingles. Not by itself, mind you. It has been a long chain of events beginning in early summer or maybe late spring, perhaps even winter or earlier, including the completion of the Kivgiq Uiñiq that so closely preceded this one, including my almost sleepless eight or nine days in New York, death here and there, and a few other events that I will not bother to detail, but in the end it was the 12, 16, 20, 30, 40 hour days that I repeatedly put in over the past couple of weeks in order to finish this thing.
But you know what? If you moved me back two weeks in time but kept the memory of these shingles and how painful they are alive and vivid in my mind and then said, "You are stressing yourself too much. Go ahead, push it aside for awhile. Because if you don't you are going to get shingles and you are going to think for awhile that you are at death's door and then even when you find out you are not going to die you will still have to bear this miserable pain of shingles for at least two weeks, maybe more. Push it aside and rest." I would not push it aside. I would do just what I did, even knowing the pain that was coming.
That is what I would have done and I would be suffering just as badly now as I am, but not as badly as I would be were it not for Vicodin.
This is just a proof copy. It is at the printers and will be there for awhile so it is not yet available to be read. But it's coming.
It's got some huge flaws in it.
It is a work of love.
Love is the only way I know how to work. It is good to get money when it comes, and it may not come again for quite awhile now, but money has never motivated me.
Love, and love only. That is my motivation.
To those who do not understand I cannot explain it. To those who do, I need not explain.
I am going to go to bed now. At 4:00 AM, I can take another Vicodin.
Don't worry. I will not become another Dr. House.