Wet Hair

If I go to bed with wet hair, I invariably wake up looking more than usually stupid, with at least one substantial tuft sticking up or out at an angle in excess of forty five degrees. When I opted to take a bath last night then, at about eleven fifteen, having taken Dog out for his last walk of the day, I resolved to resist the allure of our bed for a while, and give my hair a chance to dry. My wife had already been asleep for a couple of hours, her sleep-wakefulness cycle being in one of its sporadic episodes of disarray. I sat down in front of the TV with a bottle of Velletri, a wine of old acquaintance that is especially well-suited to cool autumn or winter evenings.

I drank from the one survivor of the pair of good wineglasses we'd bought at the Kosta Boda factory shop last year. I wasn't in the mood to watch any one particular thing, and flicked restlessly through a range of channels, pausing to listen to a minute of something on one of the music channels, or to catch a snip of news, or to ogle at a few moments of soft-porn. At about one-fifteen I slipped into bed and was very soon asleep. Whereas in the summer I will rise unprompted at six or seven, at this time of the year I tend to sleep in until eight or so, as this morning, when my alarm call came in the feline shape of a mrrrrow and a brush of fur to my face. I felt groggy: due, in part, to the wine's after-effects, though no worse overall than the sober grogginess I had experienced the morning before. During the ensuing morning chores of dressing, dogwalking, breakfast-preparation and ironing, I caught myself voicelessly repeating such bland admonitions as musn't forget to drink your orange juice and pointless self-advice like the navy-blue shirt will be easier to iron, which struck me as the kind of patronising instructions one might issue to a feeble-minded underling. It was not the interior monologue that was unusual here, rather the dissociated mindset that allowed me to simultaneously enact the monologue and at the same time to be self-consciously and standoffishly aware of its intense banality.

* * *

Whenever I've resumed a journal in the wake of some or other blank-paged interval, I have always found it easier to begin with specific details, than with a broad summary of the weeks or months that have gone unaccounted-for. For a while I was concentrating all of my writing efforts on my abortive entry for NaNoWriMo 2002. Alas, I didn't succeed in writing a novel, and find myself left instead with an almost-completed novella of about 25,000 words, which, provided I do actually finish it, will still be the longest piece of fiction by far that I've ever written. For another while I just didn't feel much like writing (or reading) anything of any substance, a stale and static phase which this is an attempt at shaking myself out of.

Posted by misteraitch at December 3, 2002 01:35 PM