Harvey Hiestand

No longer being able to sleep. I absolutely love sleeping and I have wonderful dreams, even when they're nightmares. I remember one time in a dream I had been walking through a desert wilderness and suddenly the ground all around me fell away into a bottomless abyss. I was left atop a column of rock, and a wind started to blow. It got stronger and began gusting until I couldn't keep my footing anymore. As I fell into the abyss, I kept looking at the column of rock. What woke me up wasn't the terror of falling, it was a sense of amazement at how detailed this rock column was, and how impressive the sense of speed was as I fell. As soon as I awoke, I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing the dream would continue. But it didn't.

So, on most days, I get out of bed with a resigned disappointment. Which is too bad--the real world is equally as detailed as the dream world is--I know, I know...

My desk is clean. It's everything around it that's cluttered. The wall has nearly three boxes of pushpins in it, holding up a periodic table, some lunar calendars, tons of handwritten notes, a list of passwords, photographs of random things, and to-do lists I've never to-done. My chair is one of those metal folding chairs you find in auditoriums, and it's bent--it has been for three years, and when I go to the office store, I always forget to replace it. All around the chair are piles of books, endless printouts of works-in-progress (I'm worthless at editing onscreen), reams of paper, and a half-dozen broken cell phones. It's probably not the ideal working environment, but for now, it's okay.