Sleep, sweet sleep

I sleep more than I used to.

When I was married I was up — boom — right when the alarm went off. I had to. There were two people that needed to get into the shower. Plus there was our daughter to get ready for school. Our house was quite the busy place on weekday mornings.

I was a light sleeper in those days too, constantly waking in the night to check the locks on the doors or just to wander the house. And there was a stretch there when I was staying up pretty late.  As a result I was a zombie all the next day. Don’t get me wrong. I think zombies are cool. I just don’t want to be one.

Now, my alarm goes off at 6am but I stay in bed until 6:30am, and even then it’s a struggle to get up. I feel as if I could sleep the entire day away. That’s probably not true, but it feels true.

At work I often sleep most of my lunch hour away. I used to look forward to lunch so that I could read. Now, I read a little bit and then nod off.

And it’s not as if I stay up late anymore. I go to bed at 10 most nights, maybe I’ll stay up until 11pm, but still….

I realize that some of this is due to age. I’m older now and no longer have the energy of a young man. That’s a fact. But there’s something more to it than that I think. I enjoy the escape of sleep, it’s a much more pleasant state to be in. I suppose that I am depressed to a degree. Just lucky that I have meds to keep me going. yay…

I never used to be one to enjoy sleep so much. I always felt like when I was asleep I might be missing something. What exactly I don’t know. But something…. I just wanted to be awake.

Now most days there’s nothing I’d rather do than just sleep, a sweet dreamless sleep, all day and all night.

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Too much [clap clap] time on my hands

The irony of my situation is that when I was married I was always scrounging for time to read and write, and now that I’m single and living on my  own I have plenty of extra time but can’t seem to fill it all up, although I am writing again and doing more reading than I have in a decade. A lot of short stories, especially.

When I was in grad school I could spend whole weekends in front of the computer, tapping out fiction. I’m talking literally 8-10 hours at a stretch. I might not have been writing every second of the stretch, but I was concentrated on my writing, thinking about it. Of course, that was when I lived alone. Once I got roommates it was different story. I figured other writers would understand the need for work and solitude but that was not always the case. Certain roommates I had were huge time sucks. Huge!

I guess that I’m just readjusting to living on my own again. I used to like it in a lot of ways. Sure, it could be lonely, but it allowed me to set my own pace, and I didn’t have to schedule around other people’s agendas. I can remember going whole weekends without speaking a word out loud. Now I talk to myself, like my mother. Whenever my daughter catches me talking to myself, she points out that I get that from Nana. She’s right.

To to some degree it’s probably a matter of stamina an energy. I had tons of enthusiasm for my writing when I was a 20-something grad student. But now, I’m a 40-something divorced, single-dad, and I’m just fucking tired. My enthusiasm has waned shall we say. But what are you going to do, right….

I haven’t posted in awhile

Why?

Well, turns out that getting divorced has proven to be more difficult than I could have ever imagined. It’s sapped me of my of a lot of my enthusiasm. Not all. But most. And the longer I went without posting the harder it was to sit down and do it. I don’t know.

So is this my come back? I have not a fucking clue. May be that I’m just super bored tonight and needed something to break the tedium, to occupy myself while I sit here alone in my half-empty one-bedroom apartment. Or, maybe I’m finally emerging from my hibernation or whatever you want to call it, and I’ll be blasting out posts pretty regularly from now on. Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

There’s something about this time of year, just as it’s getting cold and the first snowfall of the year occurs. It reminds me of my more optimistic days, when I was a student at Eastern, sitting in my dorm, reading a paperback, and still firm in my belief that I would be a writer some day, a real writer, a novelist or short story writer, the Hemingway of my generation.

I guess that’s why I recently picked up my copy of “Bright Lights, Big City” read it again. It was the book that really made me want to be a writer. It was my permission book, the one that showed me that I could write about the experiences that I thought were relevant because they were my experiences.

It’s funny, you know. Bright Lights isn’t a very thick  novel. It’s not very complex either. But each time I read it — and I’ve read it a number of times, so many that I’ve lost count — I seem to find something new in it, see it in a different way. When I first read it it was the partying and bar-hopping and drug use that really struck me, because it reflected experience that I was familiar with. I graduated in 1986 and spent my early twenties in the late 80s. But this time it was the character’s heartbreak that really impressed me, that I connected with. I never really understood it before. But I do now. I really understand it. Unfortunately…

And like the last line of the novel reads, I, like the narrator, feel as if I need to learn everything all over again.