Living for Disco

2.21am I awake after approximately two hours of sleep (it having taken me over two hours from the time I went to bed to actually fall asleep). I can hear something scraping ominously in the kitchen. I hope it is the cats, trying to eke the last of the gravy out of the cat food bowls. I start to ruminate on the nature of cat food. Why, for example, does it smell so disgusting? How exactly do they make the meat into those little pellets? Is it, in fact, made of tofu and sawdust shavings, with flavouring added? How do people in the cat food factories cope with smelling like the breath of Satan’s minions when they go home?

3.10am I try yet another sleeping position, but my feet feel like they are made of tin foil, and I can’t get comfortable. The lines “if you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same” run repeatedly around the inside of my head, a train of words on a perpetual circuit. I start to feel murderous towards Rudyard Kipling and his ilk.

3.25am A cat jumps through the open window of my bedroom, and lands squarely with its paw in my groin. I sit up with a speed that astonishes my stomach muscles, and throw the cat at the door. I lie down. It does it again.

3.30am I get up, and put the cat in the kitchen. It looks mournfully at its empty bowl. I sit at the kitchen table and read People magazine for a while. Cameron Diaz really doesn’t look that great in scarlet lipstick, I muse. Then I eat a piece of chocolate.

3.50am I begin to compile an ‘Alphabet of Namibia’: A is for aeroplanes, from whence babies come. B is for banana trees. C is for chicken, that well known vegetable. D is for donkeys, lining the roadsides. E is for employment crisis. I get as far as O, when the sheer overabundance of Nambia-related words beginning with O makes my brain leak from my ears.

4.30am I decide to write a novel. I wonder whether anyone has ever written a novel about someone who works in a cat food factory before. Should it be a Cinderella, rags-to-riches tale of true love in the face of icky odiferousness? Or should my heroine leave the factory behind her in search of a better life, only to find that everything she calls home resides amongst the Whiskas tins?

4.45am I move my pillow and quilt to the sofa, in the hope that if my feet are elevated, they will stop feeling like tin foil, and allow me to sleep in peace. My arms begin to feel unnaturally large, and will not fit where I want them to fit. I wonder if I have clogged up my arteries permanently, and now all the blood is pooling in my feet and arms, leaving me looking like a balloon animal. I picture the headlines. “multiple amputee wins nobel prize for literature”.

4.50am The first two lines of ‘One is the loneliest number’ replace Rudyard Kipling in my head, and set up camp.

5am. I watch the sun come up. I examine my toenails and wonder whether I should get a pedicure. I come to the conclusion that I would be ashamed to let anyone see my toenails in this state.

5.30am I fall asleep, fitfully, with a cat sitting on my shoulder. It is purring loudly in my ear and dribbling.

6.30 amMy alarm goes off.

This was my night last night. It was not vastly different from Friday night, or Saturday night, except that I believe I got three hours sleep last night, whereas on each of the previous two nights, I got perhaps one.

I am so tired I am cross eyed. When I looked at myself in the mirror this morning, a pale, crazy-eyed person stared back at me, her pupils so wide that you’d think her eyes were black. God damn these bloody anti-depressants. They’re supposed to make you all happy and lift you from the depths of an inescapable emotional hole, but instead, they deprive you of sleep, and have you pondering extraordinary inanities at stupid o’clock in the morning.

About my novel though. Do you think the idea has legs?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Lost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.