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“With a vampyre’s kiss, I’ve got a vampyre’s heart. Now I don’t roll out of bed ’til after dark. See my teeth so sharp, and my blood so stale. You know I could drink the world and never get my fill.” – A.A. Bondy

Does it get better than Sunday morning in the studio before daybreak? No, I don't think it does.

A post shared by Scott Cooper (@stearth) on

Out in my dilapidated roadside shrine before dawn. Not so much working as hunting. Trying to figure out where the next meal is gonna come from, to get me through this day. Am I flush enough to try throwing more vases? Or just more bowls? Should I start loading the bisk, or clean up that mess I left from mixing wadding, like, five weeks ago? Or get my ass in gear starting to put paint on the outside of the studio? Or… none of the above? Maybe it’s time for a nap!

Then (or before) (or both) prowling around the house in the middle of the night. “I love the color of the sky in the middle of the night.” Flailing away at the thoughts that won’t let me sleep until they’ve been tamped down or blown out onto the page. Waiting until at least five am before starting coffee. Sometimes getting up and going back down twice. Ugh…

Two Sleeps isn’t technically insomnia, but it definitely feels weird. I was pretty locked into 10:30 to 6 there for a long time, so this reminds me of real insomnia; which, blessedly, I’ve been spared since the New Baby Haze nine Falls ago. But still, it’s like an unreliable operating system. Makes me feel a little more nuts, if that’s even possible. Not automatically knowing whether I supposed to be awake or asleep adds a lot of mental overhead. A broken routine == so many more questions.

Ending up with six or seven hours total (out of each 24) is okay, but boy does it make me need a nap after lunch. And boy, do I love a nap after lunch — curtains closed, between the sheets, the whole nine. And that’s usually fine in the TH-SAT half of the week; “you can work any sixteen hours a day you like!”. But it’s a minor trainwreck in the MON-WED half. Can’t really just curl up under my desk with the lights off. Well.. I mean, I could, but it’s not like a clerk job in a library, or a mule job in a warehouse, where you just build yourself a little nest and make some flimsy excuses and no one misses you for a half hour.

Not that I’ve ever known anyone who would be so unscrupulous as to do such a thing.

Wondering if this vampiric mode is just a seasonal thing; just another season thing. So many variables in so many seasons; it wearies the mind. In Indiana now, we’ve got the weird transition of early autumn, the weather not knowing what the hell it’s going to do from one day to the next. Alternating cooling and heating in the same day makes me want to relocate to a cave and live off grubs sometimes. Things are complicated enough without the weather rewiring my brain every six hours. It seems likely that real winter — if it happens this year — will change it all up again. Maybe even just the dumb switch away from EDT will do it. Maybe my typical dalliance with seasonal affective disorder will tamp down my cortex enough that I’ll revert back to just lolling in my pinewood box all the way through the night. I’d almost prefer it.

Almost.

Then again, maybe not. As my fake therapist keeps telling me, maybe “everything” really has changed. Still a loop, but maybe a new loop. Or, like an eccentric comet, maybe a new loop that sometimes shares a path with the old planets — or seems to — but is on a path way out into space, past known trajectories, into the cold and the welcoming excitement of the unknown.

[Fuck me, there’s an overwrought metaphor for you. You’re welcome — the terrible ones are free.]

All I know is that when writing is this fun, it’s kind of hard to just lay there and sleep.

“You see it ain’t my fault, that I am this way. Just a’crying in my box for I miss the day. Lord what I wouldn’t give, for just one drop of red. Now the dew is on the grass and I am late for bed…”