August 10, 2009

• My Night of Excitement

  I know I’m nuts.  It’s a given, useless to deny it.  Between a mind that doesn’t like to stop and a body that frequently comes full stop when it runs up against the wall of chronic fatigue, I sometimes find myself just sitting and spinning.  Being an imperfect perfectionist… let’s just say I don’t live up to my own standards all the time.

  Some glimmers of light have begun to penetrate my fog of incomprehension.  I’m learning that mental stress and excitement contribute to the fatigue that lays me low physically.  I really have very little stress and excitement in my life, so I read thrillers and watch action adventure video.  I’m an adrenaline junkie with exhausted adrenals.  I know I’m nuts.  I said that.  It’s something to work on.

  Last night, when I was too tired to stay up and do anything, I crawled in bed and asked Doug to find some decent video and put it on.  He dug down into one of the media bags Greyfox sent up the valley with me last week, and found a DVD with four episodes from the 2007 season of 24.  This is my first acquaintance with Jack Bauer and I was blown away by the character.  I was irate when the DVD ended with a 12-minute teaser from the following episode.  There’s not another flicker of 24 anywhere near here, and I was hooked.

  I was also wide awake, mind running on adrenaline and body running on empty.  Doug and I kicked around various ideas for things that might wind my mind down, and I settled on volume 3 of The Ascent of Man.  I had fallen asleep the previous night, sitting up watching it, and awoke when Doug walked over to turn off the VCR.  This time, I asked Doug to stop the tape when I started nodding off in Macchu Picchu.   Then I slid under the covers and dozed off.

  That was about the time that Linda Piebean’s seven kittens decided it was time to go on their first nocturnal adventure out of their nest under my bed.  One by one they climbed up the back of my bed and started exploring on and around my inert form.  I roused enough to speak and ask Doug if he could relieve me of the siege of kittens.  He tried moving them, but some of them cried and came back while others wandered around on the floor crying.  I guess their mother had gone outside, because she didn’t respond to their cries.

  Linda’s sister, P.K. Piebean, did respond.  She started dragging the seven bigger kittens into the box under the coffee table with her own younger litter of five.  Concerned that P.K. lacked expertise in carrying kittens without hurting them, Doug helped her corral the whole bunch.  However, Rumble – the biggest of Linda’s litter – and one or two others crawled right back out of the box under the table and onto the bed with me again.  Around that time, Linda came back, jumped onto the bed – really, she jumped onto me – and started calling her litter together.

  They didn’t keep me awake long.  Jack Bauer might have been able to keep me awake.  I dunno.  By the time I woke today, all was quiet, of course.  It’s daytime.  The kittens are asleep, recharging for their next nocturnal ramble.
  

  • 4:37 pm
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