Mickey Hadick

Thursday evenings are trash night for me, meaning that I have to gather up trash from around the house and put the trash dumpster out on the curb. Trash is picked up on Friday mornings, and they claim the right to pickup starting at seven a.m., and you don't want to miss it.

In the past, these evenings--"trash night" as I call it--has been a moment of contemplative solitude for me. I am alone and performing an ordinary, rudimentary task, allowing my mind to wander a bit. It is not a form of meditation, but it is calming for me, marking the end of a week. I handle our trash with my hands, and I have a sense of the proportion of our activity. If we have had a party or friends staying for the weekend, there will be more trash than usual. If I have been in the mood to dispose of things (and there is much need for that mood) there will be large bags stuffed with now useless toys or household goods. It helps record in my mind what things have been like for me during the week.

On occasion, I've realized that there was not much in the dumpster, and so I've questioned myself what has happened that the amount of trash is down. I worry that I left the laundry room trash can unchecked, or that maybe there are things lingering in the corner of the garage that perhaps could be discarded.

The most interesting dumpster story happened many years ago, back when my Poobrador, Blue, was still alive (a Poobrador is a Poodle-Labrador mix--my own invented name). I was taking him for a walk late one trash night. I carried two bags of kitchen trash out to the dumpster and then continued on into the night with Blue on a leash.

When we returned, Blue began barking at the dumpster. He would not quiet down, and would not relent. He focused on the dumpster as if he were a drug-sniffing canine, and Scarface himself was in the dumpster.

I began to suspect there might be a rat inside. It was garbage, after all, and rats have to eat something and somewhere. I gathered my courage and flipped open the lid of the dumpster. A raccoon was inside the dumpster, and raised his head and stared at us. Sometime during our walk, he must have gotten inside, drawn by one of the bags. Blue, of course, went berserk.

This week, early in the evening of Trash Night, I noticed that one of our trash bags had been left out next to the garage, and the bag was shredded and our kitchen refuse, egg shells, wrappers, and spoiled food, was now scattered across our lawn. Whoever the culprit, they must have taken the bag with the intention of dropping it in the dumpster, but failed to complete the final three feet of the journey.

I did not rush to clean the mess; instead, I treated it as a crime scene.

My wife had no memory of carrying out a trash bag and leaving it short of its destination. But neither could she account for her whereabouts on Sunday evening which, by my examination of the refuse is when that bag made its way outside (there was a blueberry yogurt container amongst the mess, and I recalled eating blueberry yogurt Sunday morning). The easiest thing would have been for her to blame our son, but she didn't recall asking him to take out the trash.

I next interrogated my son. He claimed to have not taken any trash outside at all in several weeks. I believed him. For him to do anything resembling work, it requires an amount of nagging that makes it impossible to forget, and it is extremely unlikely that he would remove the trash from the kitchen and take it outside without being asked to do so.

Our daughter does not even know where the dumpster sits, such is her lot in life that she does not deal with garbage.

I was suspicious once again of my wife. Is it possible that she took the trash out with good intention, but was distracted in her task and left it in harm's way? I brought her to the scene of the crime, and pointed out in particular the yogurt container that suggested to me that this was trash brought out no earlier than Sunday, and likely no later than Monday (we generate about one bag each day). There was a wrapper from a Nestle Crunch bar, an empty cream cheese container, coffee grounds, apple cores, banana peels, school papers, plastic ware, and scraps of food, all of which scattered in the section of yard next to our garage. Our dogs had had a field day with this, I assumed, but there was the possibility of a raccoon making the mess during the night.

My wife clung to her story of not remembering having taken out the trash and leaving it in the yard. I was forced to let her go. As often happens on Law and Order, I did not have sufficient evidence to press charges. I put on work gloves and picked up the trash, bagging it in a new, fresh pull string bag.

There is, of course, the slim possibility that I left it there, but it is my habit to take trash directly to the dumpster, and not linger or explore. I hate to think I could do such a thing to myself, creating, indirectly a mess that I would have to clean. Truth be told, however, I couldn't account for my whereabouts on Sunday evening either.

Labels: memoir, story

The theory of circadian rhythms is that we have an observable pattern of behaviors we experience each day, the two most obvious of which are being awake and being asleep; being sleepy during your wakefulness is part of that, but not as obvious. There are also rhythms to our sleep: we go through, or attempt to go through, multiple three-hours cycles of dozing, light sleep, deeper sleep, R.E.M. sleep, and then back to light sleep. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you probably just came out of one of the cycles, and you'll repeat it if you allow yourself to fall back asleep.

I have recently been getting by with six hours, or less, of sleep. It's been going on for a while, and I'm not particularly sleepy during the day, so I believe it's enough for me. I've been able to put this to a more controlled test because I am traveling and sleeping in a comfortable bed without distractions, and I have consistently woken up before my alarm in under six hours and feeling awake and refreshed. I am also not waking up in the middle of the night.

But what if some internal alarm is awaking me, and I'm not consciously acknowledging it? What if I simply have to pee, and although I don't wake with a strong urge in place, my bladder is quietly signaling my brain that this is going to have to happen soon, and you may as well stop sleeping now, rather than go for a third cycle?

I'm in a hotel room. I have exact control of the room temperature, and it is comfortable--exactly the way I want it. I have a large, comfortable bed, and a pillow I would fight to keep. The room is dark (although I do leave the bathroom light on, and the door closed, so there is a small amount of light at the crack of the door along the floor; it's basically a night-light--I don't want to get scared). I requested an interior room away from street noise, and there are no obnoxious, drunk salesmen on the floor with prostitutes throwing parties (or if there are, I wasn't invited and they are quiet about it).

At home my sleep is assaulted by the following: my spouse using her laptop, her discomfort with the covers/pillow/temperature, the dogs moving about, the cat climbing on top of me, the dogs barking because a car drove past, the temperature out of whack because the kids adjusted the thermostat, or the kids themselves dealing with bad dreams by waking me up. For now, all of that is eliminated.

What's left is the reality that a few minutes after I wake up, I need to pee.

Well what of it? The only way I can imagine removing this from the list of possible interruptions is to insert a catheter and a drain bag. Those items can't be terribly expensive, but inserting the tube might be a trick (note to self: check YouTube for video on inserting catheter).

Even if I could eliminate the bladder issue, there are other, natural biological needs that might also signal the brain to wake me up because the inevitable is going to happen; as far as I know, there is no equivalent catheter for that. (Note to self: do not, I repeat, do NOT check YouTube for a video on that subject, because I'm sure it's there!)

I think I'm okay with six hours of sleep. I don't think I'm risking heart disease, and I'm not staggering into traffic, and my cognitive performance seems fine (but, then, how can I trust myself to judge that if my thinking is clouded?). My only dilemma now is sneaking the pillow out of this hotel.

Labels: personal growth, story

I'm about to go running, which has been an important time for me to think about me things. I'm out of the house for twenty to thirty minutes, listening to music to which I want to listen, and I distract my conscious brain with the activity of running. This frees up other parts of my brain to roam a little more freely through the archives.

I think about my current life situation a lot--job, family, finances, and home. I think about possibilities, and what would make me happier. I think about stories I want to tell, and ways I might change my life. It's my thirty minutes of Forrest Gump style running.

There are quite a few things to think about, as there should be. Things for which to be grateful are family, health, a job, and not danging my prepositions when unnecessary (see previous sentence).

I tend to have fun, or at least laugh, with whatever I'm doing. I'm going to think about ways to have even more fun while improving myself on both a personal and professional level. And maybe, just maybe, I'll let myself dangle a preposition as I select the music I'm listening to.

Labels: personal growth

I was in a colleague's office and saw two things that gave me reason to pause and think. The first was a sign on his credenza that read "You probably wanted to do something cool with your life, but you never got that job." The sign made me sad, well not sad as much as distressed, so that during the meeting I kept staring at it and reading the words.

I asked him about it, and he laughed. This is a fellow of very good humor that always seems happy and quick to smile. He said, "That about sums up my life. Now I work in insurance."

The phrase was uttered by his son when discussing career choices at a school function. He seemed to have come to terms with his fate. I have not done so, yet. I'd like to think there is a cool job out there for me. But how to find it?

I should first consider why I haven't found it by now, because I'm certainly doing something wrong. When I was about to graduate from high school, I wanted to be a writer, or to work in television, or to be an actor, but mostly to be a writer. I think I've always enjoyed the way my brain feels when I think about words, and stringing them together to tell stories.

My father used all of his persuasion to convince me to get a degree in engineering, reasoning that it'd be nice to have a job while I learned to write, and that writing was something that I could always do, but which was hard to use as a source of income. Most of that is correct, in that I have always turned to writing in some form, resulting in these blog entries right here.

I like to imagine myself making a living as a writer, but that is quite a long shot. Still, the ultimate for me would be to rise early and exhaust my thoughts working on stories of some kind. Then spend a few hours on the business of writing. Finally, I'd spend the afternoon boating, swimming, or otherwise playing with family around the house. The evening would be spent in quiet repose, again with the family, discussing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I would drink coffee all day and wine at night.

It was the other thing I saw in his office that makes me wonder. That will have to wait until tomorrow.

Labels: mistake, personal growth