Agony is waking at 1:37 in the morning, on the couch, strapped in a long, unbending knee-brace, with a terrible terrible itch on your right calf and having no way to scratch it, being able to do nothing about it, in fact, other than to open up the laptop and to write a weblog entry about it.
That's agony.
Other unpleasantness may arise if, when your wife rises at 3:00 a.m. to ask you if you need any pain medication, you tell her "no" because you aren't actually in pain at that time. What does the doctor keep telling you? "Take the medicine before you need it; don't wait for the pain."
Hm.
Well, I guess I'll just have to wait until morning now, huh?
Ouch.
At 3:43 a.m., other pain can be obtained when, during a fit of insomnia, you watch part of The Dreaded on channel 119, BMAN. A dreadful film.
(You are forced to wonder: what are all of these channels at the top end of the dial: BMAN, CHRDTV, Colours (well, that one seems straightforward), Enlace TV (all-hispanic evangelical programing, all the time, it seems)?)
You finally drift back to sleep around 4 a.m., only to be awakened a short time later by the twitter-twitter and cheep-cheep of various little birds, probably a half dozen of them, outside your window. You hadn't realized there was a bird convention schedule here or you might tried to sleep elsewhere.
Your cats hear the birds, too, and at 4:20 they come sit by the window, trying to discern their prey in the pre-dawn. The cats lick and chomp and scratch themselves. They climb on you and purr.
At 4:40 a train rolls by, quite loud though several blocks away. Its whistle sounds at every intersection, the crossings ding ding, the wheels rattle on the rails.
No sleep for you.
On the plus side, MTV seems to play that Ozzy Osbourne show all night long, and as the program doesn't seem to have a discernable narrative thread, it doesn't require much concentration to watch. It's actually kind of surreal to drift in and out of sleep with that show on the telly, all the swearing, all the yelling, the strange drug-induced states. Goodness, that family has a lot of animals, animals that are just as fucked up as the people are.
On this day at foldedspace.org
2005 — Nature Walks Now that the endless rain has, in fact, ended, and now that the weather has changed to something altogether more agreeable, I've had the pleasure of resuming my daily walks.
2004 — Observations I'm the salesman while Tony's in Indiana. Today, while out and about, I observed poor bike riders, a man with a cockatiel, and myself behaving poorly. Also, we're watching Colonial House.
2001 — Moreover Another list of links. I'm playing with news feeds from Moreover. The SciFi Channel is planning a Red Mars miniseries. Internet radio stations.
Resourcefulness is, of course, using the light of the laptop screen to scan my bedside for long objects, and discovering that the Fantastic Four comic book compilation is just long enough to reach the itch.
And stupidity is realizing, after having gone through all of this suffering, that the itch can be scratched by raising the aforementioned immobilized right leg while scratching the itch with the left foot.
Duh.