Personal blather

There is still something terribly disrupted about my sleep.

I was still up at 3:30 a.m. and slept until 11-something. I got up and did a bit of a proofreading job, then set out to run some errands, whereupon I found that I felt brain-dead. More precisely, it was as if I had this void in the left side of my skull, roughly equivalent to the size of a dinner roll, or perhaps a pony bottle of Rolling Rock. Like I really wanted to just close my eyes for a few minutes, which wasn't gonna fly, as I was driving to Northern Virginia.

This muddle-headedness may be why I accidentally went north when I should have gone south, ending up in downtown D.C., which was not a place I needed to be on a Friday afternoon. And I really thought I was gonna keel over at the fireplace store.

The vagueness and the feeling of a permanent yawn in my brain worsened on my way home, especially when I found myself in 5-mile-an-hour traffic down near Springfield.

Running the iPod helped immensely, and I'm still trying to figure out why. I did my usual shuffle-play-with-edits--in this case, skipping over a lot of the slower stuff. Wild Magnolias, Joan Jett, James Booker, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Prince, Joe Walsh, Matthew Sweet...I could feel the fog lifting. I had a hankering for Richard Thompson's "Needle and Thread," so I put it on right about the time the traffic clog began to clear. When the shuffling resumed, I got Sleater-Kinney and Joe Jackson and more RT--this time Richard and Linda doing "It'll Be Me." By the time I sailed into my little town (undoubtedly speeding) with "Subterranean Homesick Blues" blaring through the car, I was totally better--and wondering why.

Maybe when I get the sleep study I'm supposed to have done, they'll find the brain receptors for electric guitar and New Orleans funk. I envision them as lighting up in lime green and grape-soda purple, respectively.