June, 2001

Well, I dropped into bed at one o'clock, so tired I could hardly wiggle, just that toes-out ecstasy of stretching everything that hurt and waiting for the dreams, any of a half dozen will do and you gotta be just a touch older to really appreciate a bed at a time like that.

But three in the morning I'm lying there wide awake, wondering if I take a piss if I'll fall back asleep, but my skin tells me it's not going to happen.

It prickles.

So slightly that I think maybe I could just think about something else and drift off again, but at 3am when your skin prickles, there's not much else to think about. And I'm awake, I mean really awake, as if I'd had a good night's sleep which I sure as hell haven't. Misha's out like a light next to me, really into it and that doesn't help. I get up, scrunch into slippers, feel around in the closet for my old dark blue terry robe that the cat has done the stuff that cats do to terry robes to and pick my shirt off the chair, fishing in the right hand breast pocket for cigarettes and lighter. I feel for my glasses on the bookcase, grab my wristwatch as well. If it's going to be 3am, I sure as hell want to know when it's four. The wristwatch has been with me forever, a twenty-five buck Timex I bought to play golf with in the days when I played golf and it's never going to die. So far it's cost me a buck a year. Truth be told, I'm unbalanced without it on my wrist and prickly is bad enough without being off balance.

There's nothing wrong with my skin, this is a middle of the night thing and I only bring it up because it's my measure of when I might just turn my shoulder the other way and drift deliciously off and when I know damn well I may as well just go read for a while. Which is what I do, padding down the stairs in the too bright middle-of-the-night hallway light and thinking about a smoke. But I don't. I have a terror of becoming one of those wake up in the night for a cigarette addicts and I fool myself that anything under a pack a day isn't addiction. Barkley is upside down in his bed as I turn on the reading light by my chair, all four paws in the air and just the tip of his tail wags, even though he continues to snore. How can he can do that? He's a pretty damn good dog. It's just coming light enough for the mountains to show against the sky in the west and the first birds are making themselves known. I settle in to the book of short stories I'd half finished before going to bed.

It's a first collection by a young guy from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a James Michener Fellow, a lanky, good looking kid who's been published all to hell and gone in first class magazines and no doubt deserves every one of the six blurbs that adorn the back cover. The problem for me is that as a collection the stories all have the same voice and these great little vignettes of men and women and boys all have the identical 1st person narration. Which may be great in a magazine, but it's tiresome in a collection. Okay, the other problem for me is that my own in-the-works novel is having a crisis of protagonist motivation and it's bugging me. Makes me cranky, but the voice is still the same voice, cranky or not. I'm hungry.

It would probably have made good sense to have had a bowl of cornflakes at this time of morning, but I rummage around the too brightly lit kitchen instead, glancing out the window where coals still wink from the fire pit after last night's cookout against the faint and hopeful green of morning-lit new grass. We're pretty far north here and the sky that finally darkens about ten begins to show the first faint light at three-thirty. I settle for the stub of a garlic salami, both halves of a Mounds bar and a glass of peach iced tea. Not a great combination, but it seemed exactly right at the time.

The stories I work myself back into are clearly motivated and I need to pay attention to that, distill something out of it to help me find my way through some very different problems. This guy is good, very good. His stories unfold like water running through your fingers and that's tough in any length work. No matter it's the same fingers, he's good. A hundred ten pages into my own novel I'm still unsure why my guy has felt strongly enough to do what he's done and if I'm off the track, no reader is likely to figure it out.

Motivation.

Back in bed at six, I sleep until ten, but the problem's not solved, just fretted about in early light.

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