lensblog

And yet again, time passes by and I find myself having to fend off gargantuan spiders and dust-bunnies in order to find what was once my blog… Sadly, it seems to be the norm these days. Myself and some of my good friends and peers all seem to be suffering from an acute lack of personal free-time…

Oh, don’t get me wrong… Many are the nights where I’ve lain in bed, thinking to myself, I should write something… anything. Maybe post some photos. Write some prose. But all too often, on those insomnia-plagued nights, the intention is lost during the delirium that I am forced to experience until such time as I am too physically exhausted to fight anymore and I manage to snatch a few hours of precious sleep before being forced to wake up once more. Some nights I manage several hours. Others, an hour or two before thirst and Nature’s call begin to torment me in an infuriating cycle of broken sleep and waking to simultaneously solve and create the reason for my sleeplessness.

So I read. Either a book or an e-book or I browse the web, the underside of my laptop burning the hair and skin on my chest… an oddly comfortable pain. I read my mail. Browse through a seemingly endless stream of RSS feed articles in Google Reader. Catch up on my web comics. Browse art and photography sites, looking for inspiration, finding much but doing very little with it all except saving it to my hard drive… in case… maybe later… Procrastination is a terrible thing…

I look around Facebook and amuse myself by reading the comments people have left for the world to see. I gloss over the mountain of application spam, searching for those special people whose daily activities I feel I should follow. I silently smile and laugh with them, or commiserate as need be, without leaving my mark. They know… Or at least they should by now.

And I find comfort in my music. In the sound of the fan blowing full force over me. In the heat of the electric blanket under me, warming the tired, aching muscles in my back and shoulders, undoing little by little the bad posture I subject myself to every day and the stress of working in an industry that has perhaps one of the highest stress-related casualty statistics outside of law-enforcement and medicine.

I’m rambling… It’s been a while.

Perhaps this is a new form of auto-writing. The true thoughts of an exhausted psyche… Certainly I am not writing this with any plan or direction…

On night’s like these, I miss my dogs. I miss their presence in the house, the click-click of their nails on the tiles as they move about the house to get water or go outside and attend to Nature’s call. I miss their cold noses in the back of my neck, forcing me to make space on the bed for them to lie down, then proceeding to turn three of four times on the spot and then unceremoniously dropping their weight onto the mattress, sighing a gentle ‘whuff’ as they settle down again.

Lately I find myself kneeling on the floor, resting my torso on the bed. It’s an oddly comfortable position to sleep in except for the fact that my knees end up killing me after an hour or two. Then I climb back onto my bed, beat the pillows into submission again and try again. Or get water, walk around the dark house, feeling the cold tiles under my feet and leaning my fevered forehead against cool walls.

What demon torments me so, some have asked? I do not know. All that I know is that since the passing of my Mother in March 2000, I have not had a proper night’s rest that I can recall, other than through medical assistance or after being submersed in sea-water for the greater part of a day.

I find myself wishing I could escape the confines of my flesh and wander the night, free of physical constrictions such as mass and substance. I would explore the night air, listening to the lives of people around me, people that I am guilty of distancing myself from.

I would soar above the city and try to take in the dark essence of it’s concrete heart, whilst marvelling at the constant activity evident across it’s many paths and byways at even this late hour, to be captured like my beloved time-lapse photos on the ephemeral canvas of my mind’s eye.

Or I would tag along with a creature of the Night, looking to see the world through it’s eyes as it moved from street to street, yard to yard, tree to tree. I would try to understand these peculiar bipedal creatures that don’t seem to follow Nature’s advice and settle down once the sun goes down and leave the Night to her Children.

Or I would watch people’s dreams, having none of my own to experience (at least not consciously – since about the age of 12…) and marvel at the extremes of the human imagination. Such wonderful and terrible things I have heard of in dreams. And yet the closest I seem to come is watching the stream of moving images in my head as I read.

…

Is it possible for an electronic device to mock you? If so, my bedside clock may as well be dressed up as a court jester. Perhaps I should get it a jester’s hat… It might seem more appropriate then.

…

I feel the beginnings of the Sandman’s passage through the room… a heaviness that settles on my eyelids. I hope that it lasts long enough for me so that when next I open them, it will be to the sun-lit landscape outside my windows and not the all-too-familiar view of my dark room with it’s damned Jester alarm clock ticking away the minutes until the alarm sounds, skipping forward through the night on the blinks of my eyes.