Grimby’s Gratitude – Dark Energy
the E-Newsletter of Goldeen ogawa • Issue 13, December 2018
Originally posted for Patrons on December 7 on Patreon
What have I done?
- Written: Professor Odd 18/3.6: “The Last Voyage of the Odyssean”
- Art: Driving Arcana Wheel 2 Cover (digital colors)
- Published: No new publications in November!
What am I doing?
- Writing: Driving Arcana 30/4.3: “White Noise”
- Art: Personal work and book design!
- Publishing: Driving Arcana: Rotation Four (eBook)
Where am I going?
- I’m home for the holidays, and my convention list for 2019 is still being compiled. Right now my next show will likely be Norwescon in April—unless lightning strikes and I get into the Artist Alley at Emerald City Comic Con. But I wouldn’t count on it!
Dark Energy
The hard part about waking up at 3:00 AM in order to walk your dog and eat a hot breakfast before bicycling to the pool at 4:15 (so you can go on duty at 4:45) is not actually getting out of bed in the cold and the dark, when the rest of the world is still asleep and all signs point to it still, effectively, being night. No, it’s going to bed at 6:30 so you can be asleep by 7:00 so when your alarm goes off at 3:00 you’ve had eight solid hours of sleep and, once you’ve got the lights on, things actually feel pretty normal.
This is what I do four days a week, and more or less on the other three, since once I’ve adjusted, things tend to stay adjusted. Although this morning I “slept in” until 4:30. It was glorious.
It was also still dark.
Darkness is the key. It’s December now, which for me, at 44°3ʹN, means the sun doesn’t rise until almost 7:30 AM, and sets again at 4:30 PM. So getting up at 3 doesn’t look much different than getting up at 5 or even 6—which was when I used to wake up in the winter before I started lifeguarding—and it’s relatively easy to go to bed at 6:30, because my brain sees it’s dark outside and is like “this is fine.”
I see a lot of people at the pool who, when they learn that I have a call time of 4:45, shudder and say “oh, I could never do that—well, maybe in the summer. I like to get up early in summertime.”
Which you’d think it would be easier getting up at 3 in June, except that in June, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, it’s still dark. What’s worse is that in June, at 6:30, when it was time for me to go to bed, not only was it still broad daylight, people were about and doing things—taking advantage of the long summer daylight hours, which around here can reach almost to 10 PM. Which resulted in the surreal experience of going to sleep at 7, sleeping for three hours, and then getting up to use the bathroom in the middle of my “night” and finding it was still light out.
The solstices are nice, though. And after DST ends things get even better. It’s dark at bedtime, and although it can be a wrench getting up in the dark, there’s an excitement to being awake that early in the morning. Especially if I’ve successfully managed to get to sleep at 7.
Because I’m awake. I’ve had my full night’s sleep. I’m up and about and walking my dog at 4 AM. I’ve gotten to see Orion and Sirius more times this year than I have in the entire rest of my combined years on this planet. The Pleiades greet me every clear morning, and on big moon days I don’t even need my headlamp.
There is power in the darkness of the early early morning. There is also peace. So on days when I don’t have to be at the pool at 4:45, I go into my studio and I work. I work and work and work. In the darkness, without the passage of the sun to mark the hours outside my window, time feels limitless. And perhaps it’s not entirely an illusion: you can’t make phone calls at 4:30 AM, you can’t text anyone—I mean you can, but they don’t text back—and the resulting lack of disturbance usually translates into increased productivity.
And then the sun comes up and the day begins for everyone else. Then come the phone calls, the appointments, the errands, the distractions.
But I’ve already put in two or three hours of solid creative work—which for me is about my limit on any given day—and from there I can happily pursue distractions to their fullest extent.
That is, until about 6 in the evening, when I have to put myself to bed again.
But it gets easier with practice. Even in the summertime, in the broad daylight, at the end of the day it’s still the end of my day. I’m tired. And I’m also lucky that I can sleep. Sleep, and sleep well on most nights—even if some of those nights aren’t strictly dark.
The blackout curtains help a lot.
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What’s coming in December?
Patrons can now look forward to:
- Saturday updates to the Sparks Gallery
- Sunday updates to “Travels in Valdelluna”
- Exclusive sneak peeks at upcoming projects AND
- eBook release of Driving Arcana: Rotation Four! Really—promise!
ProTip
It’s commonly recommended to take cod liver oil supplements to make up for a lack of vitamin D. But did you know you can just eat the whole liver? You can buy it smoked in cans, and it’s a bit like pâté. It can be spread over toast, baked potato, or steamed vegetables—delicious!
This post has been generously sponsored by my Fellow Traveler patrons.
