While You Were Sleeping

It's that part of the day when the sky is lit but the timed flood lights are still on. Our routine lately has been to stay up until 4 or 5 and then sleep until after lunch. It's a nice routine, even though it may be a difficult one to get out of. The only trouble with this routine is many times I can stay awake so far passed the point of greatest exhaustion and then be unable to go to sleep. That and everyday this week we've had a crew chainsawing trees down. And that, necessarily, lasts from about 9-1. Donna turned in early tonight, around 3:00 am. In her absence I watched episodes 3-6 of Curb Your Enthusiasm's first season. The last couple episodes were a lot better than the first two, which Donna had watched with me. I considered that I would convince her to watch those two. Based on that I turned it off at the conclusion of the first disc. Now my television opportunities are limited to early morning news or an old preacher who gives sermons from his desk. So the news is on just for the noise. I'm drinking a cold, yet mysteriously flat tasting soda while trying to figure out the other things that I was going to write on. Oh yeah, that was one. I understand it's against the rules of grammar to end a sentence with a preposition. I can see how to comply with this rule, but do not understand the principle. I like to end on a preposition. It's what I'm all about. Ha ha. See. I did it again. Is this the best I can come up with? Probably. Thinking about this I've come to the conclusion that I'd never want to be an English teacher. I'd feel the need to enforce rules that I don't even enforce on myself and worse yet I'd have to suffer through a lifetime of crappy self-indulgent essays. Like this one. I've likely already mentioned this to you directly but I need to reiterate that Blockbuster's Movie Pass is wonderful. We've decided that we most like to rent t.v. shows. As mentioned previously, we got Curb Your Enthusiasm. We akso got the third disc of Scrubs. This rounded out the first season for us. Our Blockbuster does not carry any of the other seasons. We enjoy the show quite thoroughly and are now anxious to see the second season. This week, watching the show, I was reminded about how I had considered a career in modern medicine during the eight months that my uncle was in a coma. I didn't think about being a doctor, but more of a specialist instead. I thought it would be great to work with the comatosed and study possible ways of bringing them out of the coma. Now I can tell that idea was silly. Sweet but silly. I even thought that maybe this happened to my uncle so that I would come to understand my true calling. Sweet but silly, I flinch at the sight of a needle. One thing about Scrubs is that it makes me think about all the people who run the hospitals at all hours of the night while I spend the night watching DVDs. I won't share the profession with them, but nonetheless it gives me an increased sense of urgency. It's funny to be helped so much by fictional characters. It's like when you dream of an alternate reality that in its own way is cool. You awake to learn that this world did not exist. T.V. programs are written. And the comforting thing is that usually they are at least based on reality. It's tempting to let yourself think that the people who play your favorite characters are playing themselves. I'm sure there's a lot of truth to that, but it can't be entirely true. We want it to be true because even with their flaws we have enough information to let anything they do slide. We are without that privilege in the reality. We have our own separate feelings and are not a simple cheery bystander. There is a personal investment and it's much riskier than the possibility of not liking the movie you rent. I watch Curb Your Enthusiasn and I get a good laugh. However, if Larry David were to hang out in my neck of the woods I wouldn't laugh as much. I wouldn't say, "that guy is really funny." Instead, it would be more like, "that guy's a bastard." I relate...and that's the worst part. A couple nights ago I was thinking about how weird i is that my uncle and Mitch Hedberg have died. [Insert Overused Death Cliche Here] It just doesn't seem real. Death to most of us is like Foreign Missions, we've heard about some people who went and we may have given some money to that cause but as far as we can tell it's mythical and unnecessary. The money we gave must have just gone right back into the church. That funeral we went to was, in fact, a strange performance by the local nihilist theater troupe. But none of that is true. Not in the least. You know, how can comedians go on like nothing ever happened like everything is still a laugh riot? Funny has left the building, Mitch is no longer with us. Okay, that comes off a bit mellodramatic. It is sad, but the thing I'm trying to write about is that it's bizarre. I seriously was wondering late the other night if they had really died. I was really in need of a good night's rest that night. I wondered if it was also a dream. I didn't dream tonight because I didn't sleep. I may dream today and that could be cool. I just hope everyone survives it. I hope I can handle it when I remember that I'm not actually close personal freidns with whatever fictional character I dream about. I do that sometimes. Not all the time. It's mostly funny as opposed to pathetic. In any case, I guess it could be of help to think of Larry David. Some things are better kept at a distance. Then again, that's where we go wrong. We keep the "bastards" at a distance and break the world up into 6 billion tiny islands. Where is the life in that?

I've philosophied all that I can think of. It's on full bright now. So, that's all for now.