Friends often ask me, "Did you write anything today?" That's a harder question to answer than you might think because sometimes the answer is, "Yes, but it's nothing I would ever share with anyone." If I write a few paragraphs of something and decide "This isn't going anywhere" and I delete them, did I write anything? Or if I wrote in my head and never put it down on paper or my computer, did I write anything?
Sort of. It depends on your definitions.
The truth is that I write by some definition of the word every day. It may not be any good. It may not be anything I want anyone else to ever see. But I write something. At the moment, I'm writing this.
Lately, for reasons I can't explain to myself so I certainly can't explain them to you, I've been sleeping odd hours. My body at my current age seems to want somewhere between 5.5 and 6 hours of shuteye in every twenty-four hour period…but every so often, it wants one or two more or one or two less. And sometimes, it wants them all in a row and sometimes, it wants them serialized. A few nights ago, I slept for three hours, got up and wrote for a while, then went back to bed for three more.
The COVID lifestyle has had something to do with this. There are very few times lately when I have to get up and leave the house by a specific time. There are, of course, ZOOM meetings but they seem to get scheduled later in the day even when they involve people on East Coast time.
Back when I was doing The Garfield Show and it was produced in France, we occasionally had conference calls at 4 AM. That was because we needed to tie in Jim Davis in Muncie, Indiana and the producers in Paris. 4 AM where I am is 7 AM where Jim was and 1 PM in France. (I don't know if he still does but Jim used to be up by 6 AM. So I might send him a fax or e-mail at 3:30 AM and get an immediate reply.)
Anyway, since time has become less significant in my life, I sometimes find myself wide awake these days at 5 AM and sound asleep at 3 PM. This morn, I woke up at 6 AM and my brain was buzzing with trying to find something to post here that everyone else isn't saying about school shootings. I couldn't think of one so I began working on a story of Groo the Wanderer. This morning, his world makes a lot more sense than mine.