Polaris wrote the soundtrack to the '90s Nickelodeon TV show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Right now the song "She Is Staggering" from that soundtrack is playing in my head on repeat, especially the lines, "I couldn't get to sleep/ And then I couldn't eat/"
My shoulder keeps popping, and I'm not even a street performer.
I want to cook something awesome again, but I've been eating leftovers from restaurants and family meals for weeks now.
I wish there were a book titled How to Fall Asleep. I've got a few other How to books, and most of them are about drawing, which won't help right now.
The place I really work (I actually have to work for "The Man" and show up somewhere every weekday morning) has new faces around me all the time. (There are also new bodies attached to these new faces, but a masquerade would be fun every once in a while.) A considerable fraction of faces I only see for a few months. It feels a bit like a claw machine that keeps filling up with new plush toys and leaving some old ones at the bottom, you know, like the bears that have one eye upside down that no one wants. I had a friend in college who could win at the claw machine maybe 50% of the time, which is really good, and he gave away his bounty of plush animals. I took away a few of the crooked-eyed rejects. They needed a good home.
I keep hearing a big drip around my bedroom window. It's been like that since November. I don't see water damage anywhere, so I think it's OK. That drip sound is not regular, so it makes it even harder to sleep on a night like this.
I want some milk, but I think my tummy would get mad at me.
I want a guitar effects pedal that makes airy distortion like the kind I hear in songs by Polaris, The Pretenders, and Throwing Muses, but that's the only way I can describe it. That's my favorite guitar sound. I don't hear it anywhere anymore.
I don't know if I told you, but I tutor children younger than thirteen in math and other subjects. It's a "drop-in" tutoring program, so any number of students and subjects could appear. Yesterday the program coordinator and I were the only tutors for about eight students, all needing one-on-one attention. I was disappointed I didn't figure out how to clone myself in my experiments when I was nine. At one point the coordinator left for the library, asking if I could hold down the fort. I said, "Sure," but thought, Oh no, I know one of them is going to faint or cry or maybe they'll get in a fight while he's gone and I have no training in resolving conflicts between children, oh man what am I going to do?
I love the movie MirrorMask. The main character Helena finds a book called A Really Useful Book in her adventure in the movie. I want such a book right now to give some advice about sleeping, or maybe just help me think about life in general. None of my current books have "useful" in the title. What was I thinking in buying them?!
Yours awake,
Art