Day got off to a rocky start

- after a night of shallow, unsatisfying sleep. Woke up at four AM, and as we all know, no one lies awake in bed at four in the morning with a calm mind and a heart full of contentment. After an hour or so of rapid, useless thoughts, I wore myself out and fell deeply asleep - dreaming of swimming past whales under a sky teeming with flocks of birds and, later, entering those puzzling, familiar buildings we see in so many dreams.

Got up - still dark; fed four or five cats, showered, ate, hit the road at 7:30 AM to make it down to Campbell in time for a 9AM staff meeting but was late anyway, doomed by crawling traffic. But so was my boss, so eh.

I sometimes find drive-time a good time to think, without interruption, but one of the things I've learned - over and over, unfortunately - is that you just can't think yourself out of a dark or unsettled mood. You start in a bad place and the harder you think, the deeper you go into that hole. Trick is to say a hearty fuck it all and skim across the black water like a flat rock.

Trick is to remember the trick.

The drive didn't look like this, but it felt like this: