So I finished CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. I cried. The book ends with Ignatius being saved from his miserable, spiraling towards doom, life. Just as I finish it pops into my head that the author killed himself some time after he finished this book. I realized that no one came to save him from his life. I've never had such a strong connection to an author before. Often I am moved by the words, and sometimes I can sense the writing process behind those words, but this is the first time I've gone into the sad mind of an author like this.
Sometimes I am a pig. Mostly I have allusions of being a mature semi-sophisticated adult human being, but sometimes I fall. Tonight there was a woman in the audience wearing an amazing little black dress. Very short skirt and verrrryyy low cut, and she had the body for it. Just couldn't stop staring at her. What color were her hair/eyes/shoes? I couldn't tell you. It made me feel like I feel when I have a beer when I shouldn't. I felt weak. I felt trollesque. I had a pretty good set.
Strange week this. You may or may not have noticed that I haven't written much since the war began. Bad feelings inside that I don't want to let into my novel. I've let Myunee do some Beefrunners, but even that hasn't been much. Now I feel I'm coming out of it. However the first manifestation of the creative juices reflowing has been a bout of programming. The car geeks will notice that I have developed a new car racing skedule and search page. It's taken alot of energy this week to put this thing together. It still needs some tweeks, but I'm proud of it.
Insomnia. It's almost too nice sounding a word for what it represents. This week has been hellish. Sleep and I have seldom intersected. My mind will not believe the signals my body sends it. It has stuff to think about you see. I've been doing pretty good lately. The first few nights I just thought it was a fluke. Sometimes it happens that I have trouble sleeping for a couple nights, but then I fall back into the rythm of slumber. This week it has been a dragging horror of slow descent. Last night was the worst, greatly exaggerated by a flare-up of gout. An infusion of medication finally got me bedded at about 8 this morning. That lasted till about 1 this afters. That was a start.
The weird thing about this week is that it wasn't going to bed that was the problem. The good old-fashioned insomnia would see me lying awake for a few hours trying to drift off. I've developed method which have become pretty effective against that. This new insomnia wakes me up at 2 or 3 in the morning. Coming out of sleep like that my mind isn't equipped to fight it. I have these bizarre waking dreams that I get so wrapped up in that I forget that I am awake. Then I realize again that I am awake, but by then my brain has become so active that re-sleep is impossible.
Then there are the puzzle dreams. My brain is trying to solve some problem, but I have access to neither the rules, nor the obstacle that must be overcome. I merely have a vague notion of the desired solution and must build a logical model that will reveal to me the problem that this solution solves. This type of problem is what so occupies my mind that I don't notice that I'm not sleeping.
David Spark posted some pictures from the last night of Old Cobbs. Don't worry, New Cobbs is coming soon. Strange feelings though while looking at the pictures. I wasn't there. I shouldn't have been there. OK, I love doing comedy, but I'm not a comedian. I'm a writer who does comedy. I see the people in these pictures, well some of the people in these pictures, and they are comedians. They are people who will do comedy or die. They work every hour of every day at being comedians. I never had that in me. Comedy always took a back seat to my family. It isn't my life. It's something I do for fun. I'll never go out on the road. I'll never get the big college gig. Because I don't try to get the big college gig. So any way. All this has been in my head for a while but seeing the pictures I realised fully that I don't belong in those pictures. And after a very short amount of time, that made me happy. Don't take this wrong, but someday there will be pictures that I am in, that the people from the Cobbs pictures will not belong in. My path turns deeper into the woods, or out, I'm not sure.
Sometime everything just works. I had a very good set tonight. My energy was very good, I did a mix of old and new material. Also helping was that the audience was skewed more towards my demographic. WHAT?!? The audience was much older than usual, with 30 and 40 somethings taking the place of the usual 20 somethings. That helped me make a nice connection with several audience members during my set. Also, I was having lots of fun.
Yes bad dreams. I'm talking bad bad dreams. I mean watching monsters kill your dog kind of bad dreams. One after the other all night long. It was wonderful! Explain Please. My favorite line from Star Trek IV or V, the one with Spock's brother whichever that was, was Kirk telling Sarek(sp?), "I need my pain." I too need my pain. For the last several weeks I've had to shut off that part of my brain. Yes I'm a war wimp. I didn't want the war in my dreams so somehow, subconsciously I blocked out all my bad dreams. The only problem was that it has hurt my writing. Not that my writing is all doom and gloom, but the pain is always there.
Got back from two days in an RV. I had some fun. It turned out to be alot of work. Our next trip will be a week long, so the amount of work per day will be greatly reduced. I think. Saw some great trees. Drove some great roads. I'll be doing a complete report shortly.
I'm reading this great book of short stories by Donald Westlake. Crime stories. Very clever and very funny. What these stories have shown me and a weird round-about way, is something that has been bothering me about my own novel-in-progress. Something I hadn't noticed, but should have. I've been afraid to write certain scenes because I was afraid of hurting my wife's feelings. That sounds too trite. I'm talking about the brink of sanity and beyond kind of badness, and then the character dies. It's purely a fiction, but the connection is making me uncomfortable.