It’s easy to get accustomed to never being sure whether you’re asleep or awake.

I’m in the first week of a new jobby — the swing-shift watch on the Belle of Louisville. I’m there so the day watch and the night watch get a two day weekend, which means my schedule flips mid-week. Monday and Tuesday I’m on 4pm to midnight. That means I got off work at midnight this morning (Wednesday). I go back to work at midnight tonight (technically Thursday) and work the overnight (midnight to 8am) Thursday and Friday. Then I work Sunday 8-4 and start all over again.

The guy that’s been training me has been talking the job up a lot. There’s not a lot to the actual job, though I am going to try and learn as much about the boats, the wharf, and everything in between, that I can. Like my job as a Lot Dog, I’m not carrying any ambition with me. I’m just there to Do The Thing. And since The Thing is walking around and marking off time with plenty of time in between to sit and commune with the dirty sacred river, read, and write, I intend to Do The Thing well. Watch has a lot in common with being a Lot Dog. The only difference is that maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll turn into a Wharf Dog.

Only time will tell.

I admit to being a bit of a river stalker. I’ve applied for this job no less than 6 times this year. I applied two or three times last year. I’ve been talking myself into and out of applying for this job for about five years now. At one point I was worried I couldn’t physically handle the work, but somewhere between the early days of a the pandemic and being a Lot Dog — which meant standing on my feet sometimes for 10 to 12 hours a day — my tendency to worry about what I can and can’t do has been burned away. What has replaced it is something I hesitate to call determination. I’ve always been determined in my own way. This is something else. It’s more akin to Urge. Urge is how I describe the Thing That Makes Me Write. Urge. A human is a perpetual motion machine. Sometimes it gets broken but that doesn’t remove function, just ability. I am a perpetual motion machine. I am Urge. At this point, my ability to do or not to do no longer matters. I will until I can’t. I will write until I can’t. I will Do The Thing until I can’t. Motivations matter less than the motion.

I ascribe motivations mostly to explain Urge to people in more concrete terms. Concrete abstractions. These ascriptions are the absolute truth. I have bills. I have happy obligations to my wife and our shared life. I’m trying to be a good father to my adult daughter and a good papaw to my granddaughter. That is truth. But it’s a description added on afterwards, like a book review.

The guy training me talks up the job a lot because he wants to make sure I’ll stay. Swing shift is hard. I knew that when I told Captain Nick I wanted the job. Being a Lot Dog shook my regular sleep routine loose. Now I sleep when I can and I make sure I get enough. Luckily I don’t need more than 6 hours to feel rested. It’s entirely possible that since the lines between sleeping and waking were erased somewhere along with my worrying that my my body simply takes rest when it needs it. A mind free to wander is always at rest, maybe. I like to think of this dream as my life but my lives that I say are my dreams feel real too. I make sure to spend more time here than in the other ones.

This morning I apologized to my wife because I wish it could all be easier. I turned 49 this year. Many of my age contemporaries, some younger even, are looking at retirement. I’ve started a new job, a new education. Same old Urge, though. I’m lucky in that my wife knows me well enough to know that Urge is as much in service to her and to us as it is to me… and I to Urge. All the lines merge and erase like waking and dreaming.

In 12 hours I’ll report in from the wharf. It will be a poem. They are all poems. This is too.