The early bird can have the damn’ worm. Especially if it’s a brain worm.
Who needs a cranial parasite before coffee? Not me, Skeezix. What I need before coffee is sleep, and plenty of it.
And I really don’t need a brain worm at midnight, which is about when some noise of unknown origin finished the job of dragging me out of a sound sleep the other night.
Herself had just gotten up for a drink of water and tiptoed back to bed. After three decades of holy macaroni I barely notice this nightly ritual. I drift lazily up toward consciousness, wondering idly: Ghost cat? “Play Misty for Me?” Night fart powerful enough to levitate a sheet, blanket, and comforter? And on the other side of the bed, too. …
But it’s always Herself, having a wee or a drink or a wee and a drink. If it were a gust of the southern wind strong enough to unmake the bed I’d be sporting a fresh bruise or two somewhere.
This time, however, just as she settled back into the sack, came the Mystery Noise.
Ordinarily my practice is to ignore all things that go bump in the night, as hauntings, Clint Eastwood movies, and night farts often end badly. There will be some cleanup involved.
Alas, unable to forgo a bit of vengeance for three decades of midnight wees, I rolled over and asked, “You hear that?”
“Yep,” she replied, burrowing deeper into the bedclothes.
Well. Shit. Check and mate. Outsmarted yourself again, ould fella.
So up I got to prowl around the house in my skivvies looking for … well, your guess is as good as mine. Herself has added NextDoor to her list of online pasatiempos and recently showed me a wildlife-cam video of a mountain lion slinking up a nearby driveway with a raccoon in its jaws. For sure we have had bobcats, raccoons, foxes, skunks, hawks, coyotes, and deer in our yard.
But a peek through various windows and sliding glass doors revealed bupkis.
Maybe it was our in-house varmint, Miss Mia Sopaipilla? I checked her bedroom (a half-bath off the kitchen) but saw no evidence of midnight mischief. She was briefly delighted to have company, then outraged that breakfast was not forthcoming.
And I abandoned all hope of zeroing in on the mystery noise because the hills were alive with the sound of Mia.
Back to bed. Sleep, like wisdom, would not come. The imagination, no longer gainfully employed, was working overtime on threat analysis.
Water heater finally gasp its last? No rusty puddles by its door. Roof failure? Didn’t stumble into the package unit or any ductwork while wandering around below. Owl hit the pigeons nesting by the wisteria? No feathers. Bicycle thieves? Jesus, this isn’t some postwar Italian neorealist film — it’s your basic Yankee jump-scare, meat-in-the-seats, spill-your-popcorn slasher flick. Happily, the only Jason in the vicinity lives next door with his lovely wife, two saucy daughters and several bikes of his own.
Finally I drifted off to a restless sleep … and then, bam, Herself arose again, this time to go to work and get a start on earning the preposterous amount of money required to remedy whatever hideous tragedy had befallen us during the night. Early birds. Worms. It felt as though they were locked in mortal combat between my ears.
I padded into the kitchen to make coffee, briefly contemplated going back to bed instead, and then glanced out the window.
Wow. Now that’s worth getting up for. It’s almost better than coffee.
Oh, yeah. And the noise? Turns out it was the uppermost cardboard box on a tall stack of same toppling onto an exercise ball that then bounded about in Herself’s home-office-slash-eBay warehouse.
Guess I broke out the ladder and clambered onto the roof for no particular purpose. I will never be smart. Or well-rested.
Mad Blog Media 
That was a great read, you have the the photographer’s eye. Well done!
I am sleepy myself. My guitar bud Alan got tickets to a concert in Tucson for his birthday. His wife didn’t want to go, so he invited me. So, off to the Fox theater we went, at 5PM, to see the International Guitar Night group of 4 players from 4 different countries, with 4 different styles play alone and together. Ir was guitar nerd and music heaven! Got home at midnight, which is 4 hours past my bedtime, but it was worth it.
https://foxtucson.com/event/ign-24/
Gracias, señor. But midnight? Lordy sweet Jeebus, however did you manage it? Come 8 p.m. I’m yawning and yearning for the ol’ beddy-bye.
I agree, a great read indeed.
Whah, thankee, sir. ’Tis a mystery how the words all assemble themselves and start marching along, hep hoop hreep horp. They hardly need this old DI anymore.
M. has taken lately to swearing that a light in another room was off a minute ago and now it’s on, and I need to go investigate. Even though she’s been known to stare for what seems like hours at the 3rd shelf in the pantry looking for the penne when we’ve been keeping pasta on the fourth shelf since Christ was a corporal, maybe right after dirt was invented.
Maybe sleeping on C130 cargo net benches, in M113s, and wrapped up in a cammo net storage bag equipped me with the capacity to ignore all midnight sounds except for a pup begging to go out to pee or someone whispering “Coffee’s on.” Other than those two, don’t ask me what goes on after shut-eye and before the rooster crows.
I’ve always been a light sleeper. Can’t say as I recommend it. One minute you’re enjoying some filthy dream involving a hot tub full of chocolate, whipped cream, and starlets, the next you’re wide awake and halfway out the bedroom window before you remember, “Hey, wait a minute … I live here.”
Annie has a habit of barking like an insane pack of dingoes whenever the raccoons climb over the fence and descend on the back yard to raid the bird feeders. It gets old at two a.m. I imagine if it were a burglar, she would ignore it.
This is why Mia has her bedroom on the other side of the house. Her voice carries.
This dog has a voice that would raise the dead.
We’ve got three of those air-raid sirens across the cul-de-sac. One belongs to our Trumper buddy, the others to a LANL retiree and his kids. When they all collaborate on a tune it sounds like someone lifted the lid on Hell.
I came in the front door last night at midnight and the security door clanged when I closed it. Duffy didn’t even wake up. I think the Duffinator has left the building and the Duffy abides in his place. Even mice are safe here.
I believe that it was about two years ago that there was a loud noise in the night heard by a country that borders a land of corruption and despotism. In their case the noise became the nightmare that nobody wants. They have done their best to keep the noise at bay with bloodshed and defensive mechanisms, but the noise has the full weight of the slavery and manipulation of its’ people behind it. Sacrifices have been made and rooms have been given up but the country stands strong. The hope of help from far away neighbors, from neighbors with their own corruption and confusion, exists. Will the house fall to the intruder? To the demented maniac destined to drive his own country back into the isolation? Only time and the emergence of rational, logical thinking may help. Will the neighbors be able to pull themselves out of their own mire in time? To realize that the source of corruption may also one day become a noise in their own homes?
Or maybe a sudden massive gravity wave will erupt through our solar system turning us all into jelly and it won’t matter.
July 3, 2024, at o’ dark thirty some borachon took out my mailbox, newspaper box, and a transformer pole with a helluva racket. Nobody came to the door, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. Awakening at 7:00 AM I found a 2024 Ford pickup a slosh in beer cans and other bottles in the hay field next door. When asked by the local sheriff’s deputy and a Montana Highway patrolman: Why didn’t you call last night? My reply was they were either dead or dead drunk. What else could anybody do? Postscript the asshat walked away. My contribution was to get anew mailbox and repair the fence taken out by truck and pole.
It’s a shame you weren’t able to get up early enough and drag the wrecked truck away and hide it in a barn somewhere for a couple of years. Value of 2024 Ford truck engine = mailbox and fence replacement. Finders keepers.
Plus you could’ve used the bed for a (wait for it. …) truck garden. Badaboom, badabing, etc.
no right of salvage in Montana not nearly as redneck as FLA but damn close.