Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Missed a day

I feel like I missed a day somewhere, like I forgot to sleep for 24 hours and I can’t catch up. I took a sleeping pill Sunday, so on Monday I felt drunk and underwater and drugged and could barely think straight. I tried to fight this with caffeine and sugar and sleeping with my eyes open, but all I could think of was going home, getting into bed, falling asleep for days. My friend Bill was in town for the day, so we came back to my place, hung out, watched DVDs, played Red Faction, ate Thai food, and that was cool. A few hours of hassling with Premiere, and by midnight, it was bedtime, and… I was wide awake. I spent forever falling asleep, only to awake to the feeling that I missed a day somewhere.

Sunday night, when I took the Tylenol PM, I had the most fucked up terror nightmares ever. Some mystical force was attacking me on the subway, in some mathematical fashion, and I was so scared of it, I was yelling numbers or something, and I am pretty sure I was really yelling because it was the sort of thing where you try to scream in a dream and you can barely form the words or work the vocal chords. It was a total your-life-is-ending, Mothman conspiracy type of thing. I was hiding at Marie’s house and sleeping on her floor, and she vanished, and both of her cats were walking circles around me and talking, like it was some kind of Satanic ritual. (She actually has three cats, but one is newer, so she was not included. You ever notice how stuff in dreams is never up to date? Like how your dreams always happen in your childhood house?) Anyway she vanished, and then her dad showed up and took all of us on a tour of Knott’s Berry Farm, and I felt really guilty for interrupting the whole seance terror thing. I don’t remember much of the dream after that. But the terror part was pretty fucked up, and it bothered me for hours into the morning. I’ve been having more and more defined dreams, and I really hope that is an indicator that I will get off my butt and start writing something soon. My dreams were the best during the writing of Rumored, and it was no coincidence or anything.

So anyway. My tax refund is done and on the way to the bank, but I am torn between buying a gigantic monitor, going on a vacation, or just putting the damn thing in the bank for retirement. I would love to sit in front of 1600×1200 on a flat screen, but I was talking to Bill yesterday about land, houses, and all of that stuff, and it makes me think about that, too.

Not much else. Still very windy. I had a nice bit of Deja Vu this morning walking to work, in a crisp air of about 40 degrees with the rain just about to explode from the clouds. For some reason, it really reminded me of the early spring rains of Bloomington about ten years ago, walking around town without a car and with too much open road in front of me. It’s strange to think that was ten years ago, but it was. Damn.

Gotta call Ray. His mom is in town, and it’s even money that he put six .44 slugs in her head for some random reason. The parental cross-country buffer zone is great, but it means you have to put up with a years’ worth of cached misery in a week of time.