This is a piece I wrote many many years ago . . . .
Sometimes when it’s really late at night and I’m lying in bed and I can’t sleep, I worry. I just let myself go. I hold nothing back. I worry about my life and everybody else’s life, including people I don’t even know, and after I’ve worked myself up with all this worrying I realize I am totally 100% awake and then I worry about how I’ll ever fall asleep and I worry about what will happen to me if I don’t fall asleep and soon my head hurts from so much worry and I realize I have to force myself to think about something else and sometimes all I can come up with are more worries which, naturally, doesn’t help, but other times I wise up and hit upon something useful.
Which is what happened just last night.
My head was throbbing from all my worries but I turned on the lamp and reached for my pencil and notebook and started to make a list of everything I could think of that would describe a person who had more worries than I did, a really peculiar, verging-on-unsavory type of person, and this is what I came up with:
Cannot pronounce the letter P
Feels faint at the sight of a strand of spaghetti
Was once engaged to a man named Pinky Carbunkle (had to call him Inky)
Has worn only purple underwear since the age of 12
Won a blue ribbon 3 years in a row for her beet marmalade
Knows absolutely nothing about anything
Writes the “Misery” column for the local newspaper
Stores her diary in the flour bin for safe keeping
Had 6 brothers who all died under mysterious circumstances
Steals catalogs out of her neighbors’ mailboxes
Carves unidentifiable profiles out of olive pits
Then I was so tired I shut the light and went to sleep and this morning I felt refreshed and rejuvenated —creative, even — and only mildly troubled by the memory of a dream about getting a ticket for sitting in a car that wasn’t moving and trying to reason with the police officer who said “Is that so, little lady, is that so?”
