SLEEPLESS IN LAS VEGAS

It’s another late one. I can’t seem to go to sleep, and my thoughts are bothering me.

There’s a hotel in Las Vegas with a laser beam that’s so bright it’s created its own ecosystem of insects and owls.

The sick bug turned out to be one of those two-hour things by the way. A little sleep and I was as right as rain. Though my colleagues didn’t seem to agree.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” said one of them when I first got in. Annoying. One of the rare occasions when I had, and it looked like I hadn’t. Presumably most days (and obviously tomorrow) I look like (and will continue to look like) I’ve attempted kipping in the hedge and scrubbing up in the bird bath. I wasn’t brave enough to argue the point. I just went to make porridge.

Moments later, I trudged back to my desk.

“Someone’s stolen my porridge! Unbelievable!” I said, half quivering with outrage and half with melancholy. My porridge oats had vanished from the kitchen!

My workmates of course, heard only the outrage half, and they matched it with a giggling satire of sorts:

“Have you, er, also checked to see whether anyone’s been trying out your chair for softness?” asked Tim.

“What?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s someone who’s fallen asleep on that really comfy bed in the medical room.”

I didn’t think I needed jokes about it. What I needed was a hot bowl of lovely porridge, and my not too hot, not too cold but just right porridge oats, had been summarily nicked from kitchen.

I found myself checking my attitude and then subsequently sitting at my desk praying for forgiveness for Goldilocks.

Shakespeare never mentions September. In all his works, not once. Amazing.

I made a decision tonight not to say something about something. It might have been the wrong one, but it felt sort of right at the time. How in the world are any of us to know whether the thing on your mind is the distraction or the real thing? Push it away? Pick it up? Do something? Do nothing? Could go any number of ways. Oh well. Perhaps there’ll be another moment.

It’s not right is it, Las Vegas? If I ever lose my marbles and say ‘Take me to Vegas, baby!’ you have full permission to knock me out, put me on the sleeper train and wake me up somewhere much nicer, like Cornwall, West Wales, or Dorset or somewhere. Prop me up by those seaside arcades and I won’t know the difference.

Of course if I call you ‘baby’ you have permission to knock me out anyway.

A hotel with an ecosystem in a laser beam, indeed.

I put a message out on chat about my missing porridge. No replies, just a Simpsons gif. I went and stared at the breakfast biscuits in the vending machine for a while.

Maybe he just didn’t care for the Autumn, old Bill. Perhaps, like my Dad, he found it depressing and focused on comparing everything to ‘summers’ days’ and rhyming June with ‘moon’ and so on.

Urgh. I should go to sleep. I should at least try. I might not be able to figure out distractions but I can certainly lose myself in them, it seems! There must be a plan to work it all out regardless, right?

I do hope so. Otherwise I’ll be back here again like a sleepless wonder in an imaginary Las Vegas of distractions.