Tired

All I want to do is sleep and apparently I'm not alone in this. My mother and my friends and even my son are all reporting a desperate need to sleep for 15 or so hours a day; clearly the tsetse fly has invaded western North Carolina or the world is ending not with a bang but with a snore. Or maybe it's the change of seasons, which are changing very rapidly right now, like, several times a day so that I have no idea what to wear. At the end of the day, when I stumble out from my orange cell and emerge blinking into the daylight, I'm alone in my tights and woolly skirt and sweater and coat, adrift among flocks of tourists in T-shirts, shorts and flip flops. I enjoy laughing at tourists in this outfit on cold days, because clearly they believed when they left Inigokquit or some other igloo in the frozen North that they were coming to the Sunny South. One hates to break it to them, but the mountains of WNC are not Key West and bringing beach clothes only for your Easter break vacation is probably not a brilliant idea, although it does make me snicker uncharitably. That's why I hate it so when they snicker at me back, thinking, ha ha, silly office worker, she didn't know it was 80 outside! Don't they know this schadenfreudian laughter should only go one way?

In other news I got a box of mediocre books from Amazon yesterday and I am happy as a pig in shit. Or I would be if I wasn't feeling that it was Time for me to write a Book of My Own. I've been tossing this idea around since I was, oh, five or so, and in the 90s I even got some 300 pages into a novel about a space alien named Quisp and five college kids who try to smuggle him back out to the galaxy he came from, but it got derailed by, first off, the bad sex scenes and secondly, my own divorce. Yeah, yeah, write what you know. Now I want to write another book, even though I can't come up with much of a plot. However, I intend to press on bravely and attempt to write the kind of book that I want to read, which puts it automatically out of any kind of general interest category whatsoever, since my taste in books, like my taste in movies, runs to things with swords, explosions, special effects and men with rippling muscles who stand there bravely quoting short pithy poems about Life to the piercing winds while girls on the other side of the dune piss themselves laughing at them.

It's going to be difficult to balance sleeping 15 hours a day with work and writing a novel and semi-parenting (parenting a teenager basically comes down to two or three conversations a day, none of which turn out the way you really wanted them to) and drinking heavily and watching bad movies and staring blankly at the computer and all the other things I find it necessary to do on a regular basis. I think that work could go, actually, but my bank account has other ideas, so I will just have to squeeze this Novel thing in somehow. Maybe I could cut back on cleaning the house.