40 Thinks

My wife is angry.

Not for something I've done. But for something I've stopped doing. Sleep.

You see, I've been getting up earlier and earlier these days. Not by choice, mind you. If I had my druthers I'd be sawing wood until 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning. Which is not all that unusual since I stay up way past midnight. And have the sleep patterns of a teenager.

All that is changing. And like many men of 44, I'm rising from bed shortly after the sun rises over the horizon.

In the past, I'd awake at an early hour, curl up around my wife's pillow and catch another cycle of REM with odd dreams of Scarlet Johansen, Angelina Jolie, a bottle of olive oil, a trampoline and a catcher's mask. The body is willing, the mind however is not.

These days, I have been waking up with all synapses firing. Words, ideas, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, are ricocheting off every crease of my tiny brain. I can't roll over and hit the rack. I am compelled to the keyboard to begin the clicking and the clacking.

It's not writer's block.
It's writer's bloat.

And I'm not saying it's all good either. In fact, I think you can see from today's post, that it is not.

You would think that my increased productivity would please my wife, and my two daughters. Because believe me it takes quite a bit of productivity to maintain the lavish lifestyle they've come to enjoy. But, as is often the case when I do your rhetorical thinking, you'd be wrong.

You see, my new routine upsets my wife's old routine.

She has always enjoyed the hour of quiet solitude after the girls have shipped off to school and she had the downstairs all to herself. That is no longer the case as I have noisily interrupted all that with my coffee making, my toast buttering and my thought scribbling.

How dare I?

There is a silver lining in all this, she will rationalize. If my sleeping habits can change, perhaps one day I will learn to put the seat down.

Fat chance.