caffeine and the night owlies

Last week i did some waiting room duty for my sister who was having surgery. another sister was there with me. Mercy Hospital now has a new coffee shop right
next to the waiting room area. My sister remarked about the high cost of the coffee. I said thats why they call it starBUCKS (is that *$'s in TM?). Since i didn't have any caffeine in the previous 3 weeks and having had 2 cups
of the "Bold" Xmas blend, I found myself awake in the wee hours that night with the night owlies ( which if i made it up is a condition in which one wakes up and is unable to go back to sleep).
My thoughts restlessly came in and out of focus when i realized the Clapton song Cocaine (1st track on the Slowhand album) was wormlooping thru my brain, only "cocaine" was replaced by "caffeine":
Cocaine Lyrics
Artist(Band):Eric Clapton
by J. J. Cale

If you wanna hang out you've got to take her out; caffeine.
If you wanna get down, down on the ground; caffeine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

If you got bad news, you wanna kick them blues; caffeine.
When your day is done and you wanna run; caffeine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

If your thing is gone and you wanna ride on; caffeine.
Don't forget this fact, you can't get it back; caffeine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

(Did Weird Al Yankovich already do that parody?)

Besides giving you an opportunity to worry about your health the night owlies provide you time to think of things to put on your blog. Remembering having read "One day in the life of Ivan Densonivich" in college it occurred to me to blog "one day in the life of art dunbar". Coming Soon to a Blog near you!
(One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, originally published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir. It is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day for an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Its appearance was an
extraordinary event in Soviet literary history—never before had such an account of "Stalinist repression" been openly distributed. ).

Only i thought i would use the format of one of my favorite Galway Kinnell poems .
MIDDLE OF THE WAY

1. I wake in the night,
An old ache in the shoulder blades.
I lie amazed under the trees
That creak a little in the dark,
The giant trees of the world.
I lie on earth the way
Flames lie in the woodpile,
Or as an imprint, in sperm, of what is to be.
I love the earth, and always
In its darknesses I am a stranger.
2. 6 A.M. Water frozen again. Melted it and made tea. Ate a
raw egg and the last orange. Refreshed by a long sleep. The
trail practically indistinguishable under 8' of snow. 9:30 A.M.
Snow up to my knees in places. Sweat begins freezing under
my shirt when I stop to rest. The woods are filled, anyway,
with the windy noise of the first streams. 10:30 A.M. The sun
at last. The snow starts to melt off the boughs at once,
falling with little ticking sounds. Mist clouds are lying in
the valleys. 11:45 A.M. Slow, glittering breakers roll in on the
beaches ten miles away, very blue and calm. Odd to see it
while sitting in snow. 12 noon. An inexplicable sense of joy,
as if some happy news had been transmitted to me directly,
bypassing the brain. 2 P.M. From the top of Gauldy I looked
back into Hebo valley. Castle Rock sticks into a cloud. A cool
breeze comes up from the valley, it is a fresh, earthly wind
and tastes of snow and trees. It is not like those transcendental
breezes that make the heart ache. It brings happiness. 2:30 P.M.
Lost the trail. A woodpecker watches me wade through the
snow trying to locate it. The sun has gone back of the trees.
3:10 P.M. Still hunting for the trail. Getting cold. From an
elevation I have an open view of the SE, a world of timberless,
white hills, rolling, weirdly wrinkled. Above them a pale
half moon. 3:45 P.M. Going on by map and compass. I saw
a deer a minute ago, he fled touching down every fifteen feet
Or so. 7:30 P.M. Made camp near the head of Alder Creek.
Trampled a bed into the snow and filled it with boughs.
Concocted a little fire in the darkness. Ate pork and beans.
A slug or two of whisky burnt my throat. The night very
clear. Very cold. That half moon is up there and a lot of stars
have come out among the treetops. The fire has fallen to coals.
3. The coals go out,
The last smoke weaves up
Losing itself in the stars.
This is my first night to lie
In the uncreating dark.

In the heart of a man
There sleeps a green worm
That has spun the heart about itself,
And that shall dream itself black wings
One day to break free into the beautiful black sky.

I leave my eyes open,
I lie here and forget our life,
All I see is we float out
Into the emptiness, among the great stars,
On this little vessel without lights.

I know that I love the day,
The sun on the mountain, the Pacific
Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,
But I know I live half alive in the world,
I know half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

GALWAY KINNELL

Sicko

i'm sick of going to the doctors.( I wonder if there is a medicine for that). Everytime I think I have my last appointment and begin to think i can resume a "normal" life for awhile a Doctor suggests another test to "rule out" some remote disease or another which entails a lab test (with fasting of course) and 3 or 4 more appointments.

i've learned that i have a moderately servere case of peripheral neuropathy from an undetermined cause. my neurologist predicted i would be disabled within 10 years. there appears to be no cure though there are drugs with ugly side effects can mask the pain.
the doctor suggests getting as healthy as possible to delay the inevitable which i guess is what we all try anyway. i intend to try harder.

What is peripheral neuropathy?

"Peripheral neuropathy describes damage to the peripheral nervous
system, the vast communications network that transmits information
from the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system) to every
other part of the body. Peripheral nerves also send sensory
information back to the brain and spinal cord, such as a message that
the feet are cold or a finger is burned. Damage to the peripheral
nervous system interferes with these vital connections. Like static on
a telephone line, peripheral neuropathy distorts and sometimes
interrupts messages between the brain and the rest of the body."

or put it another way, basically the nerves die and then the muscles atrophy.
it usually starts with the feet and ascends up the legs.
the hands are also often affected. in my case my feet have lost feeling
and the muscles in my ankles are atrophied. i often stumble already.

in short my feet hurt.

I think i will turn to poetry for healing vibrations- medicine has failed . it isn't
universal enough.

one of my favorite poets is Mary Oliver :
"An intense and joyful observer of the natural world, Oliver is often compared to Whitman and Thoreau.
Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. Maxine Kumin calls Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world." "
and one of my favorite poems is Wild Geese :
Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver