On Becoming My Father

I have a certain degree of renown among those who know me for my ability to go to sleep quickly (within 30 seconds of putting my head down), and under any circumstances (like in the back of a Jeep CJ5 on a freeway, without a seat, blanket, pillow, or anything else between me and the steel body. That appears to be done (for now), as I apparently have become my Father.

I go to sleep at around midnight, and I wake up around 4am. By 5, I'm pretty sure I'm not going back to sleep in the next hour, much less the next thirty seconds. So, I get up, maneuver around the three dogs and 1 cat (used to be 2 cats before this past weekend -- Lily, we all miss you so much), pee, and move to the next room to sit at the computer.

It almost doesn't matter what I do on it, hack Processing (processing.org), email, freecell, I'm going to be at it until 6 or 7am, maybe feed the cat (Dash is as insistent about his 6am breakfast, as I am about a noon lunch, even though he is clearly still looking for his sister Lily). I'll go back to bed then (but at this point, unless Mia Houdini has reserved a spot for me, all the normal human bed configurations are taken, so Molly has to put up with me stretched sideways and using her for a pillow) and sleep until Molly wakes me as she heads off to work.

I realized during this mornings cycle, that this is exactly what my dad did for, oh say, the last 30 years of his life, as his and moms sleep cycle transitioned from 8 hours a night to 2x4s or 3x3s through the course of the day. And now that I've realized this, I also realize I'm not freaking out about it (which I have in the past, when attempting to fight some of my fathers more onerous demons), and not even trying to circumvent it (I have a number of techniques for falling asleep quickly under stressful conditions, none of which I'm using). Whether I'm easing in to the next genetically-dictated phase of life, or taking a page from dads book, I have to wonder what this portends for the future.

Somehow, through the magic of some cruel psychological twist, I've tied the death of our cat (which I was present for) with the death of my father (which I was not, and barely), and I spent most of my weekend in a fairly vegetative state, during which of course several other deaths, medical emergencies, and other vagaries of life managed to pile on during. Fortunately for me, I married extremely well, and my fabulous wife was able to help me along, even in the face of her own burdens (we both practice the alternating-meltdown technique).

The idea for this blog-vomitus started out as me planning to send an email to my little (yet deeply fabulous) sister Liz, and I thought about cc'ing some friends who I've been through a lot with, and ended up posting here (planning on sending them all pointer to it). To some, blogging is just a step away from the verbal diarrhea that has infected modern discourse. To others, a chance to share information. To me, if I'm not solving a problem with it, I'd better use it to improve my writing skills. So let me know which of these 3 categories it seemed to fall into from your perspective (if you'd be so kind).