It's the first of October, my favorite month, and it's darker than dark outside. In fact, I think I'll go out on the deck and look up at the stars.
Well, that lasted all of about two seconds. It's thirty-seven degrees out there, and even my buddy Jeff would say that was cold (albeit grudgingly). Furthermore, there is grey light across half of the sky, which is not visible here in the cabin, only outside, which means it'll be sunrise in, I don't know, a half hour or so. Maybe if I had you here with me, I'd be keen on watching the sun come up, but alone, I'd rather type, or edit audio, or read, or sleep.
I fell asleep very early last night, meaning to simply take a little nap and then get up and get my story done. I'm ridiculously close to the end--in the final, stupid scene--and meant to jump up after what my Uncle Sam called a power nap (I set my alarm for forty-five minutes). But once it went off, I got up, threw a log on the fire (which I got going first try this trip, and burned well, if not particularly hotly), then went back to sleep, leaving the lights on.
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| The Dawn Breaks (name of the ship in "Ten Thousand Coffins") |
There's no particular reason not to sleep when I'm here, but I do get frustrated with myself when I fail in my goals, or show myself to be as lazy as I used to be.*
Oh, I'm still lazy, yes indeedy, despite thousands of sit-ups and hundreds of thousands of words this year. I'm probably the laziest adult I know. And that makes me sad.
Sit-ups Today: 166
I looked at myself in the mirror on Tuesday with my shirt off and thought, "Hey, I'm not so fat anymore, am I?" but yesterday, I did the same, and I was just as fat as I had been a year ago at this time. Odd that.
So, after typing this, I focused on my story, and within a half hour, I had reached "the end." It was, without hyperbole, the easiest story I've written this year, perhaps ever, with the only hitches being when I changed the name of the monster from Siren Head and had to go back and re-describe it, and in trying to come up with a rhyme for "Wa-Ir-Ma," which is the creature's name. I never found a rhyme (it's just "____" right now), but the only one I can think of right now is "Antifa."
Push-ups Today: 56 (more than half utter agony)
The front door to the cabin is a big metal slab with no windows or ornamentation (actually, it could be a wooden door with a tin outer layer, I don't know). My dad attached, instead of a regular hinge or one of those shock-absorber-type tubes that slowly closes the door, a heavy metal spring. This causes the door not just to close, but to SLAM. I suppose the reasoning behind it was that he didn't want that door ever getting left open or ever swinging the other way due to wind and letting bears and Shoggoths in. But the actual accomplishment of it is that, when I come here and have to make several trips unloading my car, that the door is always closed, and I have to set one armful down to get it open. As a bonus, when we're here as a family, and you're trying to sleep, if anyone comes inside, the door slams and shakes the entire cabin.
I had a point when I started to write the above paragraph, but now I can't remember what it was supposed to be. I am not good in the morning.
I guess I can take this opportunity, though, to reiterate just how noisy this cabin tends to be. My assumption is that, because it's a building made of wood, with non-soundproofed walls (and who knows how much insulation in between the wooden slats), the wood is constantly expanding and contracting with the heat of the sun, and the sound travels throughout like an echo chamber. Anytime someone gets up in the night to use the bathroom, you hear both the act and the toilet flushing. When my niece and her boyfriend are canoodling on the couch, everyone knows it. And when somebody farts . . .
It might be part of the reason my Uncle Jerry forbade any television, music, or electronics up here when they first built it (this was fifteen or so years back). He wanted the cabin to be a place of escape from the outside world, without distractions and with less noise than most civilization bringts.
Three weeks ago, when there had been an unseasonably cold couple of days and there was snow up here, there was the constant noise of running water on the western side of the cabin, from the melting snow on the roof. And then, every once in a while, a big patch would break free and slide down above me, startling me with the noise. The first time we came here this year, it was worse than that, because there were three or four feet of ice atop the roof (and the neighbor's roof) and the icicles would break off or little chunks would slide down and make a racket.**
Somehow, it's getting late enough I have already packed up my things in preparation to leave. Last week, I fear I waited too long, and nearly had an accident on the road, so I'm planning to take off an hour or so earlier today. But that still leaves me with a few minutes to exercise or take a walk or sit down and write (I was using the time to edit audio, but the fuggin thing just froze on me, so I don't know what I'll do).
Not sure what project I'll work on next, but it's neat that I had gotten my writing done before my morning alarm had even gone off.
Words Today: 1660
*When I was a teenager, I could sleep in until eleven, twelve, even one in the afternoon on a Saturday or in the summer. And that was the rule, not the exception. I wish I could have even a third of that time back, now that I could put it to use (of course, I could put it to use then, write more stories, make more unending videos with my friends, just go for a bike ride or hit the thrift store to scoop up Star Wars or GI Joe figure collections for mere pennies). Unless an adult woke me up, I could waste half the day snoozing away, and yet, when my brother-in-law's kid lived with us (pretty much until he graduated high school), I would resent the hell out of him being asleep downstairs or on the couch at noon or later. I guess the GOP aren't the only hypocrites out there.
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