Do you sleep well?
Or do you wrestle with restlessness?
Do you lie there alone, thrashing in your sheets and wallowing in a depressing caresslessness?
Do your thoughts wander so far you find yourself rhyming with some absurd Dr Zeuss-like obsessiveness?
I don’t.
Not often at least. Tonight notwithstanding.
I eat well and exercise and I’m at peace with the world. Or at least I feel some form of peace as my head hits the pillow.
I drink tea and read interesting books like Dark Emu and Vilnius Poker and work hard to earn my seven or eight hours each night.
But I also drink whisky, masturbate and binge watch entire seasons of Archer on Netflix and it works equally well.
Fairly often, at least. Tonight notwithstanding.
Tonight it seems I have things to think about and my head won’t let me rest until I have thought them all out.
I lay down for an hour and racked up so many flips from stomach to back I began to wonder how I ever find comfort in my bed with so many ungainly limbs.
What do I usually do with my arms when I sleep?
They are just so uncomfortably there tonight. An oppressive weight on my chest while I lay on my back and an aggressively boney protuberance on top of or beneath my pillow when I flip to my front.
And are these absurd thoughts which just must be thunk always present in my head?
Do I really need to now dwell on just how many of the beautiful leaves of my yucca plant I managed to let wilt and die in recent weeks?
And are they even called leaves when they are so spiky and stiff or is there some word between leaf and branch I am yet to come across?
I should write more about the horticulture of Tasmania and interview all the horticulturalists and then surely I would know all the names for the various foliage appendages.
I should write more about growing things in general. After all the father of permaculture was from here and I should be so inspired to plant wonderful vegetables which I can grow and tend to and also eat and gloat about. I could feed my body and my ego.
But the father of permaculture died.
And I live in an apartment.
An apartment without a vegetable garden.
An apartment in which I currently cannot sleep because although I do not have a vegetable garden what I do have is a mind which is too busy thinking of all the interesting conversations I could be having about those ideas found within Dark Emu and Vilnius Poker to let me sleep.
But that is, really, not all that bad.
Because it has been a long time since I have written anything here and when I write things here I tend not to get too hung up on them again.
Unless I particularly enjoy them, which I often do.
But there is a catharsis to be found in writing the absurdities which I find in my mind on nights when I cannot sleep.
And I am really not all that worried about wrestling with my restlessness or obsessing over the depressing caresslessness.
Because these thoughts reminded me of a conversation I had once with a friend, also about busy brains and vegetables. 

“Do you sleep well, soundly?” she asked.
“Like, peacefully, every night?” I responded.
“Yeah. Do you have an uncucumbered mind?” 

And we laughed and laughed, and then slept well.