I hope you're enjoying Christmas!

I was getting pretty good at sleeping and then I began to take it for granted, and now the wheels are coming off again. The sleeping pills make me sleep, which is just such a great and wonderful thing, you cannot possibly imagine. But I have to take my dose every night or I lose the tolerance, and I also have to take it kind of early in the evening or the next day will be awful. So when I had a run of late nights over the last few weeks, some social and some from working late at home, I skipped the pills. Then when I started taking them again, the days were like a sort of unending stay-awake torture. This evening I missed the window for taking a pill because I was watching Pink Flamingos, as one always should when in need of spiritual guidance, and I just forgot. That's why I'm awake, sitting up in bed with the window and curtains open, watching the crazy full moon swing up across the sky. And so beginneth the Christmas holidays.

That said I am going to work on Monday. There will be very few other people around. I plan to throw away a lot of stuff. I have been saving some particularly egregious glorification of war materials that came my way this year for ritualistic end-of-year chucking out but also I think I might throw away all of my pieces of paper.

After Monday 24 December I am off work until until Monday 7 January; my goodness, that's two whole weeks. No actual plans in place. I could do with some; I better make some. I mean make proper plans to see friends and go to movies or galleries, go for walks or bike rides, maybe get very slightly drunk once or twice. December is not easy for me. December 2011 was bad on a whole other level but I can think of plenty of instances of other Decembers where the sudden removal of the structures and busyness of work have left me flapping in the wind; hungry, needy, restless and convinced that life is going on without me, somewhere over there, or maybe it's happening here but nothing's going to start until after I've departed.

I'm thinking about the summer before last, when, with hindsight, I was completely in the grip of this feeling and it would not let me be still. It sent me out onto the Merri Creek bike path every day, around sunset, where I often didn't see another person for a half an hour and ten kilometres. It felt terribly lonely but charged with possibilities. I understood that it was a restless desire taking me out onto the path but I did not understand that it was a restlessness which sought only to inhabit this Schrodingerian condition of travelling without arrival. The evening air was always warm and humming with eucalyptus and it blended with pockets of cool air smelling of water that rose from the bends of the creek and the river.