Stealing a Day

One of the drawbacks of only getting 3 or 4 hours of sleep at a stretch is that you build up a deficit that has to be paid eventually, though in my case I doubt that it ever is, in full. I mean in terms of amounting to what the so-called "normal" amounts of 8 hours a day would amount to.

At about 5 yesterday afternoon, suddenly, after watching a Netflix episode of "House," on my computer, I became very sleepy, and I laid down to rest. (Pardon my troubles with the correct use of those two verbs, "lay" and "lie." In the sense of reclining, in my mind they're so much alike that they've always been been a big muddle for me, and it's usually too much of a pain to try to sort them out, and this morning is a part of "usually.") When I awoke, my bedroom clock said that it was now about a quarter after 8, and I was positive that, because time always keeps going so fast, it was now Sunday morning.

So I did all my regular Sunday morning things, which are on the sparse side compared to the way that I imagine that they go for normal human beings, and they are in no way different from things on any other morning, except that I noticed that for a summer morning it was unusually dark outside, and it seemed to be getting steadily darker. Rain was coming, and a goodly amount of it, too!

I went on and fixed and ate my regular "first breakfast," which didn't take long as it consists of only a big slice of pound cake cut into 11 small chunks and some instant caffeine-free coffee liberally dosed, as the coffee of any sane person would be, with sugar, cream, and milk, and I also, as usual took my Sunday pills, five pills (actually four, with one large one cut in half), of a size that House would swallow all at one time without even thinking or even so much as any sign of swallowing, which leads me to think that the actor actually spat them all back out as soon as the shot was done, but for me involves five individual swallows while being careful to keep looking upward, so that I won't choke). And meanwhile, because I didn't think that this Sunday had been forecast to be a stormy day, I brought up Weather Underground on the internet, and was puzzled to see that they were calling the weather here "clear," when it was as plain as day that outside the world was being steadily overhung with some intense storm clouds that could break into something serious at any minute. (Note that I am a weather nut, meaning that for me a bad storm gathering is an occasion for joy instead of being something to dread, and so I always look forward to them, secure in my thinking that too much rain is much to be preferred over getting none at all.)

Finally it came to me. It was not Sunday morning. Instead it was still Saturday, and even still early in the Saturday evening, and that darkness was not a storm coming but instead was the usual night falling. Yet, my mindset was still such that during the next several hours, when I went out to the workshop and put in another several hours at my stained glass project, it was still Sunday, and that the next day, today, would be merely the same day, repeated, and so it has happened.

The fact that I am nearing the end of a second week while having seen only one other human being (on a planet swarming with 7 billion of them!), and that was for the regular brief Tuesday chess game, because wife is once again doing her twice-a-year thing of visiting family and friends in Florida for two weeks at a time, and that has caused me to lose some of my regular time cues, especially those furnished by her much more consistent, clockwork sleeping hours. Or you could chalk it all up to just regular elderly forgetfulness.

But there is an upside. It appears that in the face of my frequent complaints about how fast the passage of time keeps accelerating for me, this time I have done the impossible. I have stolen from time an extra day. That must be one of the purposes for that forgetfulness.