Not Fast Asleep, Just Fast

It is around four thirty in the morning and I have given up. Mark is snoozing soundly, the dog is sleeping draped across the foot of the bed, while Fat Kitty sleeps without care just two inches from my face. Not me, I have been tossing and turning for two hours already and I have decided to just stop trying. I hate insomnia. It always starts the same. I go to bed feeling very sleepy, and fall into it quite easily, then something jars me awake. Tonight it was Mark coming home from another one of his festive nights, dancing, and drinking without me. Don't get me wrong, I love it that he goes out. It leaves me home alone, in a house that finally has fallen silent. Honestly, sometimes staying home all day with Mark is like living with a parrot on crack. He loves to talk, and after too many hours of it, the silence is like a soothing balm to my nerves.

The problem with laying in bed awake, in the middle of the night, is that your mind starts grinding away. Laying there tonight, I was thinking about crazy things I've done in the past that I have no way of ever changing. I found myself feeling bad about something that I used to do almost forty years ago. I used to scare the hell out of passengers when I drove a taxi in Chicago. Instead of falling asleep, I was feeling bad about the terror I had inflicted on total strangers. You see, I could have been a race car driver when I was young, but without any way of breaking into that profession, I became a cab driver. I had great vision, great timing, and excellent depth perception. Add to that the fact that I was not afraid to drive as fast as possible, made driving a cab, a natural. What was bothering me tonight is that I put people in danger. I used to have a trick where I could catch all the green lights on Michigan Avenue, from the Hilton all the way to the Drake, a distance of two miles. To do this I had to get up to sixty miles per hour, and weave in and out of traffic, all the while leaning on the horn to scatter unwary pedestrians who had wandered out into the street. Meanwhile, the hapless saps in the back seat were desperately holding on to whatever they could, and if they were screaming, I couldn't hear them over the incessant horn honking.

I never got a ticket for driving like that, nor was I in an accident, and my passengers would always pay quickly, usually throwing the money over the seat and shouting over their shoulder as they ran away, "keep, it kid!". I might have even seen one of them kissing the ground after he got out. I guess karma and conscience have a way of getting back at you when you've done wrong. In my case it is writing about feeling bad at five o'clock in the morning.