Thursday, January 24, 2019

The Roar of Oblivion





When it hits, sleep hits hard.  I was thumb tapping a wechat message into my phone after lunch.  Sleep, like a tidal wave washes over me, as blood leaves my noggin to go digest my tuna salad.  I dropped my phone once.  Picked it up and continued to type and heard it crash again.  Clearly I am tired.  I need to sleep. 

Today, it wasn’t so different.  Immediately after lunch I continued my lunch reading “The Palace Walk” a bit further.  Just a few more pages . . .  My wife is planning a Chinese New Year event for the parents, at the kid's school.  She did this last year as well.  She asked what music she ought to play and I suggested an old Shanghai number from before Liberation.  “No.”  She wanted boisterous, chunjie songs, like they play in the malls, once they’ve turned the Christmas carols off. 



“Hey can you wait ten minutes on that?”  The music is annoying.  I know the melodies and, as mentioned, it’s like having Christmas songs on while one is trying to read.  But my ten minutes was up and she wanted to return to song-selection.  So I took my book and finished out Mafouz wedding scene in the bathroom.  As predicted a day or two ago, the father didn’t have to wait long to confront his comeuppance:  One of the fathers sing-song flings crashes his daughter’s wedding party, gets drunk and embarrasses him.  His wife, seemingly for the first time begins to experience or at least harbor anger at her husband.



I returned my desk and tried to do some typing.  The tide went out without my noticing.  Then a flash of tired and then the roar of oblivion:  out.  Then back, from nowhere, fingers stuck on the keyboard, and a line of nonsense text extending across the page.  I didn’t fight it as long as I did yesterday and made my way to the couch in the guest room where I lay down and wondered for a while, where the tired feeling had gone.  Thoughts as blood in the water, sleep returned and struck, Out for an indeterminate amount of time and then up in more of a fitful sleep then yesterday.  One that proved much easier to rise from. 

In fact, writing just now after dinner, it happened again.  Naps are hardly a full-coverage insurance plan.  This is the cost for the early morning rise. 



Wednesday 01/22/19

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