I have started carrying a notebook everywhere with me just like I used to. For words I want to remember, for example, but also for catching fleeting ideas. I always always used to have a notebook at arm's reach. The best ideas come unexpected, often as you are drifting away to sleep, and I have to catch and preserve them. Often on waking I have forgotten what I wrote, and discover with some astonishment.
"Face down lying dead in the bloody snow... What a life wasted, that could have been spent drinking on street corners..." I wrote in some hypnogogic haze the other night. It seemed like some sort of an insight or epiphany at the time. I have a vague memory I was dreaming about the stories of Red Army soldiers linking arms and singing songs as they trudged all in a line abreast towards Finnish lines to clear the minefields in '39 or '40...
But my God, how bleak, how dark, how desolate, that voice inside...
Thank God I now have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings (everyone needs one, y'know...). That reason is breakfast. I get breakfast tickets to one of the nicest hotels in town as one the perks of my position, and I have to be out of the door by 9.30 or 10.30am at the absolute very latest to make it there for breakfast time. If that seems not at all early to you, may I remind you of the former morphinist's chronic and crippling insomnia.
Funny how the little things can make such a difference. Everyone needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning or you may as well shoot yourself. Maybe tomorrow it will be driven by the desire to throw myself into some great work, or sheer joie de vivre to see the beauty of another day, or que será. But for now, mine is breakfast, which is as good a goddamn reason as any.
