Absolutely, Positively Perfect

So I woke up at 3AM and couldn’t go back to sleep.

In that circumstance, I am committed to getting up and working on “the story” - whatever that happens to be. Last night it was Mothership.

I am redundantly re-writing Chapter 32, which directly follows Chapter 31 in which the 5th-Grade narrator absolutely, positively destroys his rented house, the drinking/weed party their predatory landlord has engineered there, along with all the motorcycles, pick-up trucks, and the narrator’s dad’s boat parked there. #31 is a thing of beauty.

#32 requires the narrator to transition for the last time to “the ship”. The reader must be transported absolutely, positively into a somewhat distant venue in the dark of forbidding night with the dark and forbidding men the narrator knows in advance are there.

I actually brought #32 closer.

At 5:30A, I went back to sleep with amazing ease.

At some point after that, I had one of my flying dreams - where I spread my arms and I can easily fly above - usually a landscape these days(no more telephone poles/wires/transformers). In this morning’s dream, I flew above a beach and there were two kids on a dune, ridiculing me. So I thought to take the boy for a ride. It was easy. I didn’t care any more what he thought.

So I woke up about 8:30A. I just laid still. I had absolutely, positively no sense of ache or discomfort of any kind. No thoughts of ambition. None of that usual hassle stuff.

Finally, at roughly 9:15A, I did get up. Smiling, Sherrie was working-out and in the kitchen(to paraphrase Wally Shawn in My Dinner with Andre), where I left it earlier, I found a cup of cold coffee and a fly had not died in it.

I took my re-energized coffee up to the swing on our east deck. I sat swinging in the morning sun. I realized with elation the absolutely, positively remarkable perfection of what I had just slept through.