A dark cabaret play

Insomnia is something I’ve lived with for a long time; I have always been a night owl.

But recently my brain had decided the best hours to concentrate on anything is between 3am and 6am every morning, which to say the least is unsociable and inconvenient – had I lived in Alaska and working on the British time zone, it would be more bearable but I don’t.

My brain seems to think it lives somewhere in the West of Canada or America for some reason and has since I was a teenager!

I’ve never been there, so I don’t know why it’s clocked for it.

Anyway, last night was the worst because my brain kept me up until 8:45am – why?  Because around 6am it decided now is the perfect time to a turn a poem I’ve been working on into a play and I wrote nearly six hundred words to it before I decided I was starting to hallucinate!

So, yet again, my brain has decided only to have let me sleep for ten hours in the past two days all told, five hours is all I am getting lately in a night on average.

I think I am surviving because as I daydream I zone out and sort of go into a meditative state of stasis throughout the day, if it hadn’t of been for that habit I think I would have cracked by now!

The play is a dark cabaret, mild horror in my opinion, poetic and I am not going to share the plot here – but there are only five characters in the whole thing.  I know the beginning, middle and end and there are songs in my head I will eventually write for it and being as I know nothing about choreography I may have to collaborate with someone for that if anyone is interested in helping it go to stage someday?

It needs to be written first though.

But yes, this is not my first foray into writing a play, I’ve done it a lot in the past but most plays ended up being destroyed as I lost confidence with it.  Though some others did survive but goodness knows where they are now, finding anything in this house is like a quest for The Holy Grail!

I didn’t plan for this to happen, my brain just did it.

I could have done without the extra work, but there you go.

I am going to write it as it calls me, like I do all my things and I am living in the hope that it will be complete within the month, but like always, I won’t hold my breath!

I wasn’t even supposed to be writing anything other than poetry for the blog this morning, so it was a total surprise for me.

Funny old brain of mine!

Thanks for reading!

Happy Birthday Henry!

It was a beautiful day when you were born

For me a wish came true

I held you in my arms so warm

And never wanted to let go of you

You are loved and you are wanted and you are cherished by me

In each and every way, I just wish that you would see…

My love for you grows stronger

Each and every day!

Because I love you truly, in each and every way!

Currently reading May 2023

I am currently reading quite a few book according to my Goodreads.com list, but I would say I am only really active in four of them for the past week now, despite there actually being 22 books on the list, a handful have been slowly slogged through for the past year!

But never mind – it’s just the result of an ever increasing chaotic and information starved mind!

The four I am currently reading are from the library so I have to whip myself to read them before the 21 days is up!

They are;

The High Five Habit by Mel Robbins

Grow your own poem by Kate Clanchy

A nature poem for every day of the year Edited by Jane McMorland Hunter

Eating to extinction by Dan Saladino

“The high five habit” by Mel Robbins is being read the fastest because I am trying to get my act together basically!  I finished a free Mel Robbins course a couple of weeks back and I wanted to learn more about this “high five habit” I’ve heard about and although I have been doing it for a few days now I have forgot on two days, so it’s not ingrained to do that yet for me. 

But I have noticed a difference with me approaching mirrors nonetheless, I have a faint smile these days, which is something – because I was a pretty miserable person whenever I look in mirrors before this thing.

I’m really trying to motivate myself to fight for a life and I tell you it is hard, it is a battle and I have virtually no support in doing this – I am on my own!

So I have to haul my own ass to change, as Mel Robbins says time and time again “nobody is going to save you, only you can save you”.

So that’s what I am trying to do.  Save myself.

“Grow your own poem” by Kate Clanchy has been borrowed and reordered to borrow from the library with small breaks in between since November!  Why?  Because there are a lot of small tasks in them and I would like to do them spread out, so I could learn better that way – it will stick better.  If I read the whole book then go back to do the essay one after the other I am more likely to forget what I am learning.

So I am doing it my way and it works!

I have noticed an improvement in the quality of my work and so has Paul and I thank this book for it!

“Eating to extinction” by Dan Saladino, is a gripping read about how humanities social progress and diet is actually going to eventually starve out humanity because it is unsustainable and not very diverse; monocultures and picky farmers are literally making extinct thousands of alternate food sources around the world yearly, in order to condense our diets down to a few of our favourites.

Which by and large is not healthy for us and not a wise thing to do in the long run because of climate change, but also our microbiota is starving which is causing all kinds of auto-immunity problems and other health risks.

And if you know me, from reading things about me in the dim and distant past, not only am I a huge advocate for sustainability and paleo thinking, but I am also incredibly geeky about microbiomes!

“A nature poem for every day of the year” by Jane McMorland Hunter – again I am reading this to kind of study poetry but also because of Ray Bradbury’s idea of reading a poem, an essay and a short story every day. 

I read a lot of non-fiction daily anyway, it’s a habit I’ve always had, I don’t read much fiction to be honest but when I do I tend to like picking up short story anthologies and I virtually never read poetry until recently, so I felt like a kindred spirit of Ray Bradbury when I read this quote the other week!

I used to read fiction a lot when I was younger but I got out of the habit of it because I started to panic that my ideas were like this and that and this too!  So it made me worry constantly about plagiarism.

Again, if you know me, you’d know by now I am an incessant worry wart!

So to ensure I don’t give up my current words in progress (WIP) I got out of the habit of reading too much fiction.

Which is kind of stupid, but there you go.

Thanks for reading!