This is probably the most difficult time of day for me. The time before I drift off to sleep. Usually I’ve been home for 4 or 5 hours by now (sometimes only 3)…so I’ve had a chance to fully remember, despite all the accumulated shit, that I am the only one that lives in this apartment.
It’s usually at this time that I have finished binging on the series du jour on Netflix or last night’s episode of whatever I normally watch on Hulu+.
And it’s about this time of the evening that my brain…or rather my mind…grabs me by the mental short hairs and says ‘Dude…you need to write some of this shit down…we can’t keep having it rattle around in our head like this.’
So…I start to write. Sometimes my body chimes in with a heartfelt, ‘OMFG are you kidding me with this shit? Dude…you’ve been up 19 hours already. We need to re-charge. Write this shit down tomorrow.’
And so sometimes I listen to my mind and keep writing. And depending on how deeply I feel what I’m writing, I can usually bang out one of these posts. Sometimes I’ll make some headway on the book I’m writing (yes–I really am writing a book–of sorts).
Other times I listen to my body thinking that I’ll be able to grab some time tomorrow and work on the writing that seemed so important before I crawled under the sheets.
Only tomorrow rarely comes.
Well, THAT tomorrow, anyway. The tomorrow where I carve out an hour or two of the day and get all Hemingway on it. That particular tomorrow is a myth. It rarely comes. And when it does, usually the emotion (or whatever other trigger I had at the time) is usually so faded and over-analyzed that the writing seems flat (at least to me) and I have to wait until some other mental splinter gets lodged in my brain bucket.
Ain’t that just a peach?
Well…no, not really. Because the thing is…tomorrow almost never comes. Sure…there is the arbitrary measuring of the passage of time. THAT tomorrow seems to have no problem getting here.
No, it’s the tomorrow of the ‘someday’ and ‘one day I’ll do this’ plans. Getting stuck in future what-ifs can be almost as tough as their historical counterparts. Wallowing in the past, or getting stuck in the infinite-daydreams–both have the end result of taking us (well, specifically me) away from living in the moment.
I don’t know how else to explain it. But the few times I have honestly been able to live in the moment actually live in the moment have been the most amazing moments of my life. Well…this lifetime anyway. I remember bits and pieces of past lives, and they had some pretty great moments, too.
I think I look to that escape because the reality of living in the moment is sometimes scary as fuck.
I live alone. I eat a bowl of cereal whilst sitting on a futon for dinner (sometimes it’s pizza…or chinese…or White Castle, but always that same fucking piece of shit bargain basement futon). I watch streaming media and split my mental free time between thinking of the next witty or insightful think I can put on this blog and trying to make a mental list and hope I haven’t forgotten anything for my upcoming work trip to Houston.
And as long as I’m not obsessing over what Prior-Life Todd did or fixated on what Future Todd needs to do, I’m ok.
And you’re OK.
And now we have the title of a weekend commune to go find ourselves.
To be honest…part of the problem with staying up to write is that sometimes my body takes over anyway, and I drift to sleep. Waking up only to look at the words on the screen and woofer …er…wonder what the hell I typed.
Until finally I concede that maybe I DO need some sleep.
Like now.
Now I need to head to bed. I have a workshop over in Dreamland. That’s where I’ve been writing the book, mostly.
-A.T.
Todd Skaggs Writes 