Things That Wake You in the Night

Things that wake you in the night

moon-11-30-09What wakes you from sound sleep in the middle of the night?

For me it’s usually thoughts of mortality – the past few years it’s been the mortality of our species, or the mortality of those facing the war on terror on the front lines, or those actually living in terror in countries where Al Qaeda and their ilk run rampant like Pakistan and Somalia.

Tonight maybe it’s the mortality of my mom as she faces her second confrontation with cancer, or perhaps it was just a self pitying sense of my own mortality as I laid there awake with only my right eye open and debated whether it was worth it or not to toss about a bit and try to get back to sleep.

Maybe it’s none of those and just the night trains; first a laden long train of food from the harvest thrumming and clacking lightly across the plains, then a multi-engine laboring leviathan train of coal groaning across the plains hauling heavy black carbon from the deep seams of the earth to the power plant. Then a third train lightly thrums through, blaring its horn like the others at each distant intersection; creating a far dopplering diesel wail through the cold mist that’s become snow further West.

I doubt the train theory however; we live near the head of the Santa Fe trail and the trains run in multiples here every night, hence I am quite used to every sound they make and find them comforting reminders of the industry of our country when I hear them in the dark of the night.

So then I opened my other eye, the one that’s not sadly obsessed with reality, and went downstairs to write this and light my first cigarette of the day. Yes, I am a fool who is familiar with Akrasia.