About the boat shoe story – if you’re reading this, it wasn’t about you. It was about mixing Nyquil and Tylenol PM, which has left me in a haze for the last 24 hours. A post-work nap seemed to help to a certain degree, but I woke up so tired and confused, I couldn’t remember what city I lived in.
It’s officially hot here, at least 90 out long after the sun has set. There’s a heat advisory, and I’m spending the day in a various patchwork of air conditioning and heat. The bedroom starts hot, and I take a cold shower. I take a long, sweaty walk to the train, and the subway car is like a meatlocker. Then I get another hot walk to the semi-cool office. It’s weird how you can walk past some stores on the street, and a wall of cryogenic mist pours out onto the street. Some parts of New York are supercooled, almost in denail of the climate in the asphalt jungle. And others, like my place, don’t even have basic climate control, and bake like a century-old village in a third-world country.
About the Tylenol PM/Nyquil thing – it amazes me how, on the very edge of sleep, I have an almost idiot-savant ability to think beyond my normal ability, in the most creative context. Right before I fall into the darkness of sleep, I dream, almost sleepwalk in a totally lucid state, and sometimes think of the most asinine but complex concepts. The design of a time travel device seems as simple as pasting two Word documents together, and I know every detail, but then I forget it as I drift into sleep. Last night, it felt like I wrote an entire book, a sequel to Rumored to Exist that made total sense, had incredible depth, and then I forgot all of it. Sometimes pieces of it come up in the dreams I have, especially the more detailed ones I remember that happen right before I wake. I think I am going to write a book where I lock myself in a hotel room with a crate of Tylenol PM and try to write down every dream I have.
It’s too hot in here to keep writing. The bedroom is twenty degrees cooler with the new aircraft engine fan, so I better go in there and read for a while.