I can think after ten a.m. and before six p.m. but the mornings and eveningsare treacherous. I think I’m thinking and instead I’m just maundering about. Worse than that—

See! I just lost the connection I was trying to make! It’s 8:49 and I haven’t had enough tea to jerk my brain into order. (Are you drinking Starbucks coffee? There’s a terrific amount of caffeine in their coffee. Probably why you’re not sleeping well.)

So I’m losing good working hours…
Pause.
Did I use the word, “working?” I take it back. What do I use my early hours for? Drinking tea, writing in my journal and writing these posts.
Pause.
Did I hear someone shout “Write them later, Elinor”?
No. but I’ll go eat breakfast all the same.

In Speak Memory, Vladamir Nabokov writes in Chapter Five of bestowing on a character in one of his novels “some treasured item of my past. It would [then} pine away in the artificial world where I had abruptly placed it.”

Yes, that’s true. Years ago, I wrote a short autobiography, just a summary of events and people. I included the time in grade school when Joan Mendick lost her temper with me. We were playing under the tall pines on the needle covered earth when she whacked me in the head. My glasses were knocked off so it wasn’t first grade.
She had a terrible temper and she was old enough to control it.

Now I wonder: did it happen or was it something I imagined. I think it happened, for otherwise I have no memories of her. She wasn’t a special friend. And you can see why.

But writing it now means it’s not mine any more. Who does it belong to?

I think about flossing: am I doing it enough, am I doing it the right way, did I do it today. I once asked my present dentist what was the worst thing people did to their teeth. He paused, thought and said: They brush the wrong way. The wrong way being across the teeth, not up and down.

I asked my former dentist what was the worst thing he’d ever seen (as a dentist). He said he once had a man who came in with all his teeth ground down to stubs.

Aiieee! So many questions: first, why did he wait so long to see a dentist? Did someone nag him? Did he just get dental care insurance? Did he decide to go on the stage–finally realizing his life’long dream?

Back to flossing. Do you floss your teeth if they are slowly disappearing
Ponder that and get back to me.

I’m beginning to drool. I catch myself putting on my makeup with my mouth hanging open and–yes, drooling.
I could call it saliva but– that’s perhaps the proper term when one is young, younger. At a certain age or condition, it’s just plain drooling.

By now, I’m sure political correctness had changed the name to something nicer: saliva malfunction, perhaps. Disability of the functions of the mouth. the longer, the better.

Like idiot. A favorite word of mine but not in favor now. It comes from Greek where it meant “a private person,” not a helpful one. In ancient Greece, one must be involved in public affairs to be considered worthy. The word idiocy dates to 1487 and was modeled on the word for prophet and prophecy. Someone a little touched, in other words.

So I’m not a drooling idiot. Just a prophet who communicates only to herself in her mirror.

Do chickens sleep? Do they dream? What happens to chickens if they are deprived of sleep? And, most important, how do you deprive chickens of sleep?

I watched a DVD about sleep. Psychologists wanted to find out how chickens slept after being deprived of sleep.

Why, you ask. I guess because birds and mammals have REM sleep, dreaming sleep. And chickens are birds. Even though they are silly.

So- how do you deprive chickens of sleep? Luckily someone in the lab had a ferret. In a cage. Chickens: ditto. Place ferret cage near chicken cage and nobody gets any sleep.

But the ferret! Surely he had a nervous breakdown. Likely he lost all his fur.

And the chickens? I don’t want to think about how you measure chickens’ dreams.

All this learning at home is perhaps too stressful for me.
I’ll go lie down.