And here’s the real test. I don’t want to write today. I’m tired and it’s cold and there’s snow and ice outside and I haven’t had my coffee and Doolies woke me up late last night and I was angry at her and then I wasn’t but I still have the taste of anger in my mouth and the last thing I want to do is put these words down. Have you ever noticed that anger tastes a bit like lamb fat?

I knew going in that the real test of my new goal would be on days like this. Would I meet goal? Would I consternate endlessly to sneak around the goal’s backside? Would that even count? Or would I story? I pounded almost two sentences of story before my eyelids started sliding. I commanded them to stay open but they weren’t listening. I have a pesky suspicion that they never listen, at least not really. They close of their own volition constantly. I just poked a finger into my eye and guess what: my eyelids closed even after I told them not to.

I’m still jetlagged with a balance of sleep debt hanging on top of my head. I’m not sure I’m even a believer in sleep debt. Or maybe I’m a believer but not a true believer. There’s a big difference between the two. Believers believe something is true, where true believers know something is true a priori, that is, the true believer believes the truth before and not withstanding any investigation or experience. Yeah, I made that up too.

The problem I see with sleep debt is that even when I’m very tired and sleep extra sleep to try to work it off (assuming, for the moment, that it exists), there is a good chance that the extra sleep will reset my sleep schedule and cause me to wake up pathologically yawning. That is bad as with pathological yawns comes blazing headaches, and with the headaches arrive nausea and a desperate need to work off the sleep debt.

I do wonder whether you really need to work of sleep debt like you would credit card debt, or whether it dissipates over time. I spent some time trying to think of an analogy for the dissipation and I didn’t find any. Maybe there are some dissipating credit card debts, but I’ve yet to find them. That would be cool: a credit card where the debt disappears over a long enough period of time. I guess that’s how minimum payments work. Regrettably, it would take fifty years to work off any significant balance that way.

My thoughts are very random and unorganized and very unintelligible and very padded today. My eyes are glued to the word count at the bottom of the page. I know they shouldn’t be, but it feels like one of those chore days during the Marathon. Yes, I know, get on with it. Get back to the old man and his wife and their wedding photographs. That’s what my story is about in case you haven’t figured it out yet.

I switched off the wi-fi on my computer. I was very close to browsing through inane videos and even inaner message boards. I’m an information addict, and not in the good way. I crave the refresh more than the information, the fanboy more than the reasoned debate, the boring more than the engaging or challenging. In short, I’m a typical American in search of ways to strangle time on the mat while the referee slaps out the three-count.

Ah, I’m almost there today. These consternations really shouldn’t reckon toward the word count. There’s much in the world that really shouldn’t happen but does. This is just another one of those things.

Speaking of weather, if you’ve been catching the news, the State of Washington has been buried under snow and ice over the last two days. It hailed and snowed during rush hour yesterday, beginning almost exactly when we started walking to the van. There were plenty of accidents on the roads and the commute was long but exciting. Our eyes were glued to the traffic thingy, and I watched with some of the information addiction as they updated the maps and accident reports. I refreshed the information often and it was very satisfying.

Today promised to be dry and cold. I woke up hopeful that school—err, work—would be cancelled because of yesterday’s weather. I checked my mail and there were no messages. I was disappointed. I would have liked to sleep in to work off some of that sleep debt. Who am I kidding—I’m not a true believer, there is no such thing as sleep debt. So I drove to the vanpool, and most of the riders were still planning on driving into work. I had my moment of choice. I knew my choice had consequences, since all choices have consequences. And I also knew that those choices and consequences were the very meaning of why I was put on this earth. I won’t try to sugarcoat it for you. Every time you make even the most unimportant decision, you’re designing and deciding your character. You are the decisions you make, just like chickens are the bugs that they eat.

Halfway to work, we received the mail message informing us that while the campus was open, the facilities would not be open. That meant no cafeteria. Getting back to the choices, one of the reasons I decided to go to work was because of the hot lunch. When I stay home I sometimes forget to eat. Maybe it’s not so much that I forget to eat and more that I’m too lazy to get something to eat. Not surprisingly after a week away my cupboards are bear. That’s a funny word: cupboards. I imagine there was a time when it was very novel to have boards hammered onto the wall that held the cups. Cups were probably the first dishware. You don’t need plates (think oversized turkey legs held in grubby greasy hands) and you don’t need silverware (think pocket dagger for the hard to chew beef slabs). But you need cups if you want to drink. I guess you could drink out of a bucket or a trough, but those are hard to move around. If you want portable drinking, you need cups. Everything else is optional. And with cups there’s a need for boards to hold them. I should have been a etymologist but only if they let me make stuff up instead of base my findings on research. These are ridiculous sentences. Sometimes I need to write ridiculous sentences to say nothing. This is a lot of nothing.

At this point I would normally sing a short song. The song doesn’t have lyrics, but is more of a sweet tune, which, I am sorry to report, is difficult to convey using the written word. It’s short and catchy but not very memorable—you’d probably forget it after the first time you heard it. And if you heard me sing it, you probably wouldn’t even catch the real tune. I’m not very good at finding notes myself. I need something to cue me, like the Doolies or my trumpet. Instruments are good that way: when tuned properly, they make it easy to find the sweet spot of the note, which is the right pitch for that note. Not that I ever was capable of finding that sweet spot, but it is possible.

So I’m in the van and we’re halfway to work and I realize there’s no turning back. I’m stuck going to work. The roads are empty and mostly without ice. The campus roads are a bit icy and dangerous and very empty. The offices are no better, at least with respect to the emptiness. I didn’t find much ice inside, and it was no dangerous than the normal backstabbing and politicizing and the dodging of falling computers. When the mail went out about the service closures, most people chose to work from home. Those are some smart people. The day was sunny and cold. I did manage to eat something at lunch. I had to bum a ride from a coworker to go somewhere that wasn’t closed, but it was better than starving.

There you go. That’s the goal. Sorry for the absurd musing. I had hopes of better things but hopes like wishes don’t always fly. I’m such a loser.