A break in sleep

I seem to be starting to wake out of complicated dreams at four in the morning again.

Where am I? Between moments. The year is warming; the days are longer. A few days ago I saw the movie Cabin In The Woods, which was a dark horse I had not seen coming and was great fun. (I have made two or three enthusiastic recommendations of it since, and have just comprehended that I have possibly sabotaged them all by referring to “Cabin By The Lake”.) In the meantime this is still the spring in which I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the Finnish B-movie Iron Sky, and am chafing bitterly at the fact that it still does not even have a release date for the U.S., while, for example, it is going to open in Australia on May 10th and I do not have the money for an airline ticket to Brisbane. That’s how I place myself – between those two bright smears of color. (And of course there’ll be The Avengers this weekend.)

This is also the time when I look like Pirate Thug No. 3. I grouchily began to shave my overwarm beard and then stopped, leaving myself with a bare chin, muttonchops and a moustache, and so briefly looked like an Old West bartender. Then, to placate apparently everyone about the unruly hairs on my head each of which apparently wanted to strike out alone and establish its own empire, I shaved my head shiny. I continue to occasionally fight fierce battles with my weight, which have not gotten very far, except that I’m now twenty pounds below my all-time high, which is still tubbier than I ever expected to be. I like to eat, is my problem.

I could write more than just the mention about Iron Sky. The trailer, and the teaser trailers before that which were made to raise money from fan donors to make the film, have had me daydreaming happily for months. I enjoy things more in anticipation than in the actual event, usually; I get mileage out of them. The movie isn’t going to be nearly as good as my dreamings, and that’s fine with me. There is a hobby in itself in wandering around muttering pettishly to myself, “Yes, the Nazis on the Moon; to be precise, the Moon Nazis.”

I’m still taking my copyediting courses. They are the same massage, the same combination of hot towels and shocking ice cubes. When I miss things on the assignments, I get a nasty reminder that, in choosing copyediting as a career, I have decided to specialize in bonehead mistakes, and every flaw I miss will be a bonehead mistake of mine. My theory is that the fact that I’m talented at it will compensate for this; meanwhile there’s alarmingly more to be talented at than I knew. In any case I can be very thankful that these are online courses, because handling commutes is a major source of sputtering entropy and mishap for my fragile brain. I am much less optimistic about any activity in which I actually have to be somewhere. I could tell you stories. Doing things on the laptop, I can shine bodiless.

Discussions about things; arguments about things… in a lull, I think. There are still the same day to day obsessions and head-scratchings. But there have not been the same sort of Twilight Of The Gods efforts to prove that my thoughts are clear on this or that. Last year I was in disputation with Carol in New Mexico about some things; the only manifestation of that this year has been that I sent her by surprise a string of science fiction paperbacks for her birthday that the talk last year made me think of.

Did you know that the adjective form of common sense is commonsense, one word, no hyphen? I did not. It’s a detail of precision made irritating to me by the fact that I don’t believe that “common sense” exists, or that it can be appealed to in any useful way (when you have been being berated, have you ever soberly noted that you neglected to consult your common sense, which would have warned you of error?), or that believing that you have it is ever anything other than dangerous smugness, and so I would recommend against ever using the word in any way. But, like so much else in our society, it’s just something you have to deal with. I may have to edit a manuscript in which it is used. So: I have taken the lesson. Which is depressing as all get out, when I sleepily re-read this paragraph. Perhaps part of adulthood is just coming to understand that sanity, whatever it really is, is just your own personal hobby.

Part of me wants to take up arms against that last sentence with everything I have.

Time to sleep some more.