Naps are grand but I don’t like the idea of second sleep. I prefer to slam down into unconsciousness and have absolutely no interaction with the outside world for 855 contiguous minutes. I don’t want to wake for the (imaginary) dog barking or the ringing phone or to feed the wood stove. I don’t even want to have to get up to pee.
In the far reaches of history, before the advent of the electric light orchestra or Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist TV, most people slept in two separate phases, divided by an hour or more of wakefulness. Writers have long liked the uninterrupted time to write and crooks to steal. Field workers could awaken to have sex. Priests might use the time to pray.
Hmmm. Four hours of sleep. Hot weasel sex. Four more hours of sleep.
Yeah, that has a good ring to it.
I was particularly awake at 6 this morning, enough that I considered getting up after just 5-1/2 hours sleep. Shotgun fire woke me again at ten-to-seven and kept doing so for more than an hour. The 2012 Vermont Migratory Bird Hunting season for Ducks, Coots and Mergansers restarted at 6:50 this ayem. Somewhere in there I dreamed that I was feeding the (imaginary) dog who was romping across a chopped corn field.
Did you know that coots are medium-sized water birds with mostly black feathers except for their white forehead which gives rise to the expression “bald as a …” And the common merganser is a really big duck while the brant is a really small goose.
As far as I can tell, duck hunting is like fishing from a boat except colder. You go out, motor across the lake burning a lot of gas, then sit around all day in a 4×6 room. You end up spending $500 per pound for something I don’t want to eat anyway.
Now deer hunting, on the other hand, means you get to take a tramp in the woods, shoot off as many as a few $1 cartridges, and stock your freezer for pennies a pound. Mmmm. Bambi steaks. Bamburgers. Bambighetti sauce. I understand deer hunting.
Tom Ripley’s father-in-law is a deer hunter. He keeps inviting me to deer camp.
“At the end of the season he shoots our Christmas tree,” Tom said. “BAM BAM. BAM BAM BAM. Then he calls everyone out to ‘see what I got.’ Of course that means everyone (else) gets to drag the tree back to camp.”
Duck hunting just got a lot more attractive.
Would not mind some that “hot weasel sex” myself.
I wake up at 0320 hrs with the aid of an alarm clock. Since my last visit to Dr. Fingermann, my urologist — and his medicinal prescription of *Old Guy’s Pills* — I no longer have the need of a middle-of-the night traipse to the toilet to pee. And…were it not for the clock I would oversleep all the way to four.
Mrs George elbows me — usually hitting a cat instead — and I awaken, cut off the clock and drag myself into the kitchen to make coffee. Ten minutes later when I re-enter the bed chamber, she is mumbly awake but able to comprehend that I have orange juice and hot coffee on a tray that must be guarded from the errant leaping of spastic felines who hate to be stirred awake before they’ve had their full 18 hours. (Cats sleep even when they appear to be awake).
As in Herr Blogmeister’s neck of the woods, there have been times when my nocturnal muse was interrupted by gunfire, but that has not happened in two months — when Janic shot at a repo driver who was hauling away his car in error.
In a few months, when the pseudo conservataive/christian Romney wins the White House, I expect to spend the first post-election-week’s allottment of nights sitting up with a pot of coffee and cocked .357 in paranoic protection of my dwelling, my goods and my wife’s sacred virtue. Those citizens of a differing ideological bent — who have loudly voiced their violent threats should the current White House messiah lose — will feel differently about those issues if they trespass on Poleczech turf. May I borrow a term I recently read on this blog: Bam!
But I digress; and for the sake of brevity I will close.
— George