As it turns out… I never made it to Syracuse.

Is this particular mishegass just me? or do you do it too?

It goes like this.

Start with one perpetually wacked-out body clock - there are various not-very-enthralling clinical explanations for this, but I don’t think it’s news to anyone here that I pretty much keep vampire hours as a general rule.

Add one early morning per fortnight - yes, every other Friday I have to be up at 7 AM because of the Candidate for Canonization who comes to my house and miraculously reduces its Squalor Quotient, and who after 15 years inexplicably isn’t yet showing any signs of wanting to fire me. And yes, I know, getting up at 7 AM is not much of a hardship for most normal people, but bear in mind that for me getting to sleep before 4 AM is usually well-nigh impossible, which puts a slightly different perspective on the matter. (And that I’ve never aspired, or lowered myself, to any semblance of normalcy.)

What you get… well. Heh.

What one SHOULD get from that combination, and what one WOULD get in a rational scheme of things, is the use of some form of heavy sedation on the Thursday night, be it a tiny blue pill or the business end of a large blunt instrument. Whatever it takes to knock one out at a reasonable hour, to make the Friday morning less of an ordeal and oneself slightly less of a zombie.

What one DOES get from that combination, at least if one happens to be ME, is straight out of Pavlov, if Pavlov were operating in a parallel dimension with mirrored organisms. What one DOES get, yea verily even WITH the tiny blue pill and the blunt instrument… is exaggerated wakefulness (productive wakefulness, no less, wide-awake wakefulness with real work getting done and ideas being churned about) lasting until at least 5 AM, often later, so that one crashes out just as the boidies are beginning to make a racket and the sky is beginning to lighten.

At which point getting an hour of sleep only makes things worse. So of course I do get that hour of sleep. And of course it does make things worse.

Is it just me? Am I the only dad-blamed ornery contrairy cuss consistently stupid enough to do this? (And where’d all this pseudo-cowboy talk come from, all of a sudden, hmmm?) It’s OK. You can tell me. I can take it.

Anyway, that’s my mishegass. Part of it, anyway. There’s been other stuff going on, but that was pretty much the deal-breaker. In other respects I was surprisingly ready for the trip - had stuff mostly packed and organized and figured out, and had myself pretty well convinced that all systems would be go if I could only absorb enough caffeine. Dropped Luke off at the slammer. Came home and wrestled a surreal laundry problem to the ground. Started moving things downstairs and toward the back door. Started noticing that it was getting later. Late enough that if I didn’t hit the road instantly I was going to be contending with Friday afternoon rush hour.

It was at that point that I actually sat down and thought about driving six hours or more, and it became clear to me that I was nothing so much as a highway accident waiting to happen.

I called Jennifer and started proposing a possible Plan B, something that entailed me crashing out then and there and getting up at ass o’clock the following morning - just as the boidies were beginning to make a racket and the sky was beginning to lighten - and making the drive then. (And you KNOW what happens when I have to get up at ass o’clock, right?) Jennifer is wise. Jennifer told me what we all know already: “You’re crazy.” Six-hour drive, twice in under 36 hours. I almost can’t say she let me off the hook - it’s more like she pushed me off the hook.

An hour or two later, as I drove to the slammer to retrieve Luke, I realized just how right she was. It was good getting back here in one piece.

So… no Grand Opening party for me.

I’m still really sorry to have missed seeing all those friends both real and imaginary, and to have missed Dye Day with Nora, and to have missed being part of the Big Event.

But it was totally the right and necessary call.

In the event, I actually got a good deal of work done over the weekend - after a straight 12 hours’ sleep, that is.

The party? A big success. I can’t report on it myself, of course, but you can read about it, and see pictures, on Jennifer’s blog. And on TheTserf’s blog.

I may be a blog slacker, but at least somebody is still minding the store.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Bloggerei. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.