I was asleep, as usual. I try to do it at least once a day.

Thinking woke me up.

Sometimes it puts me to sleep.

What was I thinking this time?

I tried to grab the shreds of memory before they dissipated and got away.

I seemed to remember how it had worked earlier. I do remember that I had told myself, yet again, that I should find a key word, repeat it often enough so that it would survive sleep and waking and trigger the thought I wanted to keep and pursue and write it down so it wouldn’t be lost forever, because in my sleep it sounded pretty good.

Woke up, thought I had it, went to get coffee, the stuff of life, came back to my chair, and it was gone. “What was I thinking?”

“That tree’s gotta go!”

The voice rang out through the room. It was coming from outside, where the professional assessor was making his judgment as a pronouncement.

He brought his prognostication inside and reinforced it by example.

“You can see what the roots were doing to that wall. They’ve crawled all the way over to the house, under the foundation, and the house is just beginning to tilt. Not much, but a little is too much.”

He took a marble out of his pocket and put it on the floor.

“Watch what the marble does when I release it.”

He released it.

We watched.

The marble rolled north. The tree is on the south.

The man got excited. He was a professional. He had gone to marble-rolling school and had a certificate.

“See? If the house was level, the marble would stay put.”

I saw.

Then I started to speculate, because that’s what I do. He had started it, and I couldn’t help myself.

I was watching the desertification of the neighborhood, and, by extension, the world. We were cutting down the trees, uprooting plants, leaving bare earth. Already the Amazon Rain Forest was gone. We were hastening the demise, one tree at  time.

Those are gloomy thoughts. I don’t like to think gloomy, because I’m basically a cheerful guy.

They’re painful thoughts, and I don’t like pain. If it’s self-inflicted pain, I can learn to desist.

This meandering and wallowing in a miasma of thought, finally eventually brought me around, so I hoped, to the reason I started this ramble in the first place, a key word or phrase which would survive my waking up from sleep.  

“The best laid plans.”

That’s a promising beginning of something to think about, and this was probably it.

And then more of the phrase “of mice and men.” I can identify with both.

And with William Faulkner, whom I considerably revere and I wish more people would, read him and watch the movies he provoked, even re-runs and second attempts.

And then the next part of the phrase which brings Robert Burns into international focus, “gang aft agley.” I have myself so oft gang agley that I can’t count how many.

And the tragic ending zinger, “and leave naught but grief and pain for promised joy.”

Sad but true, this view of the human condition.

But I don’t want to remain sad but true. By wanted realignment, I can remain cheerful and hopeful. I can resist and deny reality. I can choose the future I choose to choose.

As Shakespeare says, via Hamlet, “Take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.”

I’m all for that.

I know I could think more about things, the ways and means, but for now, I’ve reached enough.   

Now I can go back to sleep.

I wonder what I’ll think up next.