Burnt Offerings

I’ve been having this recurring dream the past few weeks. The situations and locations are  always different except for one critical element: I know that if I fall asleep, terrible things will happen.

I spend the entire night, night after night, fighting to drag myself out of sleep, finally jerking awake, only to realize it was just a dream. But the minute I begin to fall asleep, panic sets in again; the car is going to crash, the children are going to wander off, the important person is going to walk in at any moment. Quite simply, I must wake up.

Nothing seems to help. Today, my tactic is to induce sheer exhaustion. I ran a 10k, spent three hours weeding my garden (what? you don’t have three hours of weeds in your garden?), and tried taking the antique mower for another spin. Unfortunately, the right wheel no longer rotates. I attempted to take it asunder and fix it (how complicated can that era of technology be?), but mostly just succeeded in mowing part of my thumb. It might not be complicated–and I will never know, unless I succeed in defying the mechanical law which decrees all nuts and bolts, joined before my grandparents were, shall everlastingly twain become one–but its blades are still sharp.

I will now attempt to clean my barbecue.  I have never actually used my barbecue, but it seems like something one might do when one is thwarted on every other hand by the gods of yard work. You won’t allow me to trim my grass? Fine, I’ll  char the fleshy parts of grass-eating kine on that most American of altars, the back yard grill.