Dog Meets Wolf

The lone wolf was walking around this morning when he was picked up by a low-slung grey sports car. Beige upholstery. Lovely young lady. And a sweet black dog named Chelsea (you would never name a dog like that 'Arsenal'). It was a good way to start the working day, he thought.

Timeshift

At 6.30 am, everything looks oddly purple, with discordant yellow light lancing into the darkness from faraway houses. The smells are different and there is an odd disjunct between people who like getting up at that time and those desperately hanging onto blankets and the cloak of sleep.

The aroma of coffee, necessary for some, anathema to others, percolates around the stubborn houses. I scent fried eggs, butter, mushrooms. Occasionally, there are less-pleasant smells: wet dog, garbage truck. Someone with a strong floral perfume has passed by recently. The air smells cleaner, and the chocolate-tobacco smell of night-time industrial venting is much reduced.

It all seems pretty alien. And then I realise the main thing that makes all of it so strange: I used to be awake at this time most days, and now it is a special occasion. Heh.

Morning Has Broken

I woke up all over the place this morning. In one ear, a ringing noise; in the other, a cold blast of air. I was on the left side and it was not the right side, being the wrong side. Sometimes you have mornings like that: unsettling, disjointed awakenings with pains in odd places.

The reasons may be simple: lack of proper sleep, a thermostat set too low (or too high), the dogs having a fit downstairs at 4 am, the cat having a hissy fit at the dogs, the wrong coffee (or too much of the right one). But the effect is to parlay a normal day into a surreal one, one in which a layer of magic realism seems to loom all over the quotidian landscape.

Well, I've had enough of this. I'm going back to sleep for a few minutes, and I hope that when I wake up, everything will have reset itself back to what it ought to be. Or something else less disconcerting. Heh.