Periodic Movement in G

Today my brain is fudge after lying awake until the wee 4am hour, brain racing and having those disturbing and grossly exaggerated middle-of-the-night-insomniac thoughts. The longer it went on the more definitively I felt like little planet (or non-planet) Pluto very far from Earth. I awoke at 7:30 and since then doctors and nurses and manuscripts and the sounds of an upset printer have been swooling round me, a heavy lump of fudge in an office chair. I have been trying to edit the first half of the first page of an article on Periodic Movements during Sleep (PLMS for the "in" crowd). It doesn’t work to read a few words of one sentence, a few words of another several lines down, and then an acronym several words over, and expect it all to come together. Uh-uh. I told the Good Doctor I work for, a s____ m_______ specialist whom I continue to hear is The Man in the field of s____ m_______, about it. He said I’m not supposed to do that, lie awake with thoughts racing for hours. There I go again looking too hard for the answers.

Although he’s The Man in the field of s____ m_______, the Good Doctor is a pretty down-to-earth guy. Christ, I make stupid mistakes and we laugh, he makes stupid mistakes and we laugh, and upon his request I just showed him some poems I had published. So it weirds me out when I’m walking down the hall and an administrative type stops me—or comes to my office instead of his, which is directly across the hall—and asks me to ask him something or other, which usually I know nothing about, and often I don’t even know who the person is who is asking me to ask him something or other. I have to bite the inside of my mouth real hard to keep from retorting, "I don’t know. He’s right in there. Go in and ask him." This is where the Good Doctor and I are on the same plane. When I go into his office to ask him something that someone else asked me to ask him, he gives me the "what?" look that I probably have given that someone when he or she asked me. As in, why does a simple thing have to be made so complicated just because we are in an office setting? What? This "what?" look is more specifically the Blank Stare. Most people who know me have noticed the blank stare I give when I don’t know how to respond to a situation, which is really indicative of the opposite of blankness on the inside—a million thought-mice running and running, that all converge in a big What?. Several people close to me have pointed it out. A fella named Glenn here in New Jersey calls me Rock because of it. The Good Doctor’s got this same look. What are the odds that the Rock would start working for the Good Doctor who also has a Blank Stare? Such is life, and that’s what I love about it. And I thank the whole team of gods for giving me such an anchor in my new job.