Tag Archives: sleep

2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.20.26

0530

The old merled dog wakes us at 0330. The plot against sleep continues through the winter. The winter is full of plots, real and imagined and at this early hour I can’t tell if it’s the one against my wife sleeping, the one against me sleeping, or the one in which the dogs crawl under the porch to take a shit. I may have to take up midnight fishing just to sleep properly again. The plots exchange themselves out of convenience, because now I’m certain the dog’s plot all along was to get me down to the basement. She knows I will give up and come down here, coffee and apple and tobacco and words. 

In my head, the plot unfolds in which I question why I bother getting out of bed, why the tired machine persists. The usefulness of a man is defined by the amount of money for which he exchanges his time between birth and death. These mornings of coffee and apple and tobacco and words I try to keep in mind that practice and faith in the mystical mechanics of the universe are enough. Ply the old ways. Fill the head with notions, jigger, then empty. Every line and phrase is a word cocktail, the output of a machine made for that purpose. The old merled dog knows nothing of this. Only that something drives her, too.

no one will know I ever arrived
until I’m gone
kicked along by some other current
a pebble 
gradually worn down
into bone dust

merled
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steam water feed pump, winterized.
2026, Day Book, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.6.26

This body wakes me at night, all silence and waiting. 

After going to bed at a reasonable hour (I have been returned to the reasonable hours) not so much for the lack of things to do or the energy, but the absence of  will to go further in the moment. 

This is what a seed feels like, buried deep in cold dirt, right?

Last night I woke up around 2 in the morning, itchy-throated and coughing. These seasonal ills linger longer when the body has fewer requirements on it. This, I tell myself, is what a winterized steam pump feels like; the rusty bits itchy against air and metal and gear memory of energy turned into work. I must talk my brain out of steam engine metaphors. They drive me away from where the currents keep depositing me, demanding I make good. It’s easy to show bravado until it isn’t. Cast out into the world again at 52, a few years younger than when Confucius began his great (and last) 12 year journey.

I make myself get up so’s not to wake her up. Her days are still filled with the world while mine are flooding with words, gray hair, and an insistence that mocks wisdom. Drag, drag, drag the body, leftover from scattered winter sleep with the hope of a seed and faith in the love of her whose sleep I guard leaving the bed.

The morning will not be kind. I will have to choose how kind to be to it.

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2025, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose

Wednesday is a Floating Day

This means that the rest of the time, we’re passing one another in our home on different schedules, grabbing for whatever time we can get. (from ” The Faded Sepia of River Mud“)

On these days I feel like I’m operating in a different time zone.

No matter how much I try to let myself sleep in or try and make myself stay awake when I come in from standing 2nd shift watch, I wake up around 10 AM. Today is Flip Day in my schedule… I’m on night watch, midnight to 0800 tomorrow. I try and get a few things done around the house, write, drink tea instead of coffee. I know Earl Grey has caffeine in it, but there’s a little less caffeine in tea than in coffee and I find it easier to lay down and relax after tea. These days are me, the dogs, and an ungrateful, sweater humping cat. I’ve been watching this Netflix show, The Diplomat. Other than fish bowl murder mysteries, classic British sit coms, and oddly unending loops of The Mentalist, I like well written political intrigue.

What can I say? Television fiction is the only place I can find palatable politics at this point in the timeline.

It’s raining and snowing today. I’m putting off what is probably a novella knocking around in my head. I’m not often plagued by longer fiction nagging me to write it, but this one’s been going on for months, since taking the Mayor Andrew Broaddus to South Point. I’ve been writing that story in fits and snatches between rounds and reading Driftwood: A Biography of Harlan Hubbard. I want to get some sleep, but I also don’t like to waste one of my two full days off in the week.

I’d like to say I’m being amazingly domestic while Amanda is out doing the Good Work of the World. But I’m slouching in my very tired wing back chair, feet up on a foot stool, Chromebook perched on my right leg, writing. Season 2 of The Diplomat is on the television. This set up is sort of ideal for most of the writing I do; floating in the middle of things.

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