You know your life has reached a new level of absurdity when you can’t even seem to decide whether you are sleepy or not.

I am serious, I am in a state right now best described as suspended exactly between sleepy and awake. And by that, I do not mean half-sleepy, sort of sleepy, or anything normal like that.

What I mean is that half of me is very, very sleepy, and the other half is not sleepy at all.

At this point, I would much rather be asleep all afternoon and waking up in the usual puddle of flop sweat than be in this maddening half state. I am getting all the pain and distraction and difficulty of being sleepy without the promise of sleep to make it worthwhile.

Because I can’t sleep. Trust me… I tried. But I just could not fall asleep. And I don’t know why. My usual reasons, like my feet are cold or I have too much caffeine in my system, do not apply. It’s too warm a day for cold feet, and I have not had any caff since Friday night. Surely I have metabolized all of it by now.

I suppose it could be worry keeping me awake. I had a mishap with my cheque recently that has me worried and feeling stupid, and that is likely acting as a psychological burr under my saddle.

See, when I took my monthly cheque, the cheque upon which everything depends as my sole source of income, out of the envelope this month, I tore it a little bit. I guess I was a tad too eager to get at the cheque inside and was not careful when I ripped open the envelope, resulting in a rip on the right hand edge of the check.

The rip went down about halfway down the check, and was not even an inch from the right edge.

I did not think much of it. Rips do not matter much on checks. It is not like a tear on a check lets all the magic money powder drain out or anything. So I just stuck the cheque in my wallet, and did not give it any more thought.

But then, when I went to cash the cheque on Friday night, I found that the section of the cheque between the rip and the right hand edge was just plain gone. Somehow, the rip continued and that part of the cheque detached and, as far as I can tell, vanished from this world.

Because I can’t find the damned thing anywhere.

And it makes no damn sense. It had to either detach while it was in between the envelope and the wallet, in which case it should be right here in my room, or detach while in my wallet, in which case the missing piece would still be in my wallet.

But I can’t find it either place. I suppose there is a tiny possibility that it detached while in my wallet then somehow fell out, but that seems highly unlikely.

But then where the hell is it??

And without it, I am going to have to go to the social assistance office and get them to cancel the old check and issue a new one, and lord knows how long that will take, and how much hassle, not to mention the sheer humiliation of having to go to the office and confess what a fucking doofus I am, not even able to take a check out of an envelope properly without fucking it up.

If I found the missing piece, I could just tape them back together and cash it that way. But no. The missing piece is gone forever, or more likely, gone till I don’t need it any more then back to mock me by being in some really obvious place.

Like in said wallet, for instance.

So that is probably what is bugging me and making it hard to sleep. I think the suddenness of the discovery of the problem, plus its public nature, made the whole thing especially traumatic.

I mean, I was right there in front of the Money Mart lady when I found out. I even handed her the broken cheque before realizing there was a piece missing, and pathetically begged her to cash it anyhow.

But the portion missing has one of the two amount values on it, and you need both for a cheque to be legal. I do not blame her for turning me down. The bank would have rejected it and then Money Mart, and her as their employee, would have been on the hook for the dough.

That is too much to expect from a stranger.

But the sudden public humiliation coupled with sudden doubt about my financial future as well as my just not handling the unexpected very well probably all contributed to my worry and stress and depression over the whole thing.

Holy crap…. then again, never give up! I just did one last desperate search of my environs, and low and behold, here is the missing fragment of cheque!

This is one of those moments in life that I feel should be accompanied by the Legend of Zelda “Just got something!” sound effect.

So phew, I will just cash la cheque when I go out for dinner tonight, and all will once more be right with this world, and I can relax.

Now to firmly cement this lack of catastrophe in my mind in order to remind myself that sometimes things work out, and the worst possible outcome is not guaranteed, and life is not so harsh, especially if you can develop a little resiliency and optimism.

And now that the issue is resolved, I suddenly feel all calm and relaxed and sleepy!

Well what do you know about that?

Time for me to take advantage of this pleasant spring day…. and take a nap!

See you later, faithful readers. thanks for helping me talk myself through a crisis!

Today’s almost random topic comes from a very kickass Fishbone song, to wit :

Watching the video, it occurs to me that you almost never see a black guy playing acoustic guitar.

I mean, they must be out there. There must be black folkies. But other than the guy at the beginning of the video I just linked and Tracy Chapman, I can’t think of any.

Hello there all you fine and fancy folks. Here we are between topics again. I suppose this is the default mode of my blog, really. Perpendicular output, that is to say, linear in a way that is rotated ninety degrees from the common plane. It is a straight line through my twisted mind, and hence seems random and meandering to those outside the framing context.

And seeing as the framing context is the inside of my brain, most of you out there can not see it. (And for all you who can, enjoy the show, no refunds, and the management cannot be held responsible for lost items, innocence, sanity, or lunches. )

Today has been the usual quiet Saturday. I am, as per the norm, alone in the apartment while Joe and Julian are visiting with Joe’s family for board games.

Speaking of Joe, it was his birthday yesterday. He is an early Taurus, the sun having only entered that sign a week ago. I am a late Taurus, born May 19, quite near the transition to Gemini, but not as close as my other roomie (and Joe’s love) Julian, born on the 20th.

So we are an all Taurus household. Makes for a quiet, stable home. Just how we like it! Maybe we could use something to shake the place up now and then, but what the heck, nothing is perfect.

And perfection is not as perfect as it used to be anyhow.

Really liked this bit of dark and morbid comedy I found called (for some reason) If I Could Be Sweet by an author calling herself L. K. Shaw.

I love its tone of self-indulgent morbidity and deliberate silliness. It is not the sort of story to take too literally, otherwise you will get bogged down in logistical and logical questions about how is it nobody can tell the narrator is still alive and how she survive the trip in the coffin and so on, and missed out on the fun little romp about life and death and boredom and angst and life in the modern world, where we can get so stuck in our middle class weightlessness that we throw ourselves in front of a train just to feel something besides numbness for once.

To give it my usual highest compliment, I wish I had written If I Could Be Sweet. I certainly find the style and approach extremely appealing, and immediately began feeding large and meaty chunks of it into the vast and seething cauldron marked “MY INFLUENCES” in the middle of my brain.

A lot of people would be offended, I suppose, by how casually it treats things like suicide and death and rituals of mourning and so on. Certainly, if you want to be offended, there are plenty of grounds.

But me, I have a big morbid streak and a pretty sick and twisted sense of humour, and so a story like that is right up my twisted little alley. And who hasn’t wondered who would show up at their funeral,and what they would have to say about you now that you are gone,

It is a supreme bit of egotism, and I have entertained the notion myself many times.

Also under the category of twisted fun, we have this delightful article filled with everybody’s favorite, historical predictions that turned out to be extremely and hilariously wrong.

Here are a few of my faves from the article :

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty–a fad.” – The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903.

How much you want to bet that said bank president eventually made a sudden disappearance off of the invite list for Horace Rackam’s social calendar once the Model T took off?

But some of these are more understandable. Like take this one :

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” – Marechal Ferdinand Foch, 1904.

And that was perfectly true…. in 1904. Even as late as the early days of World War II, it was not clear that airplanes were good for anything but maybe reconnaissance. It takes a very special kind of person to be able to see past the immediate limitations of a new technology and see the possibilities that open up once those limitations are overcome.

And some of these are so idealistic and naive that is practically breaks your heart.

“By the year 1982 the graduated income tax will have practically abolished major differences in wealth.” – Irwin Edman, professor of philosophy Columbia University, 1932.

Oh, if only, Professor Edman. What you failed to foresee is that that money is power, and the people with the money are the people in power, and they will use that power to protect their money and hence their power. One of the fundamentals of human nature is that power seeks to protect itself, and that the people with the power will forever use that power to maintain itself, and to seek more power. The gathering and consolidation of power in fewer and fewer hands is like a fundamental law of the physics of human nature, and the primary opponent in the fight for social justice.

And the fight against corruption, which is basically the same thing. The definition of justice is “the degree to which power equals responsibility”. Perfect justice would mean that justice and responsibility are in perfect balance with one another.

But power without responsibility is the dark dream that is the soul of all corruption, and lurks within the hearts of all people, awaiting only the opportunity to tempt good people into wrong action.

Damn, I should write for Stan Lee.