chasing sleep

This isn't insomnia so much as nocturnal inspiration, I guess; I'm still tired but I had a couple of really good runs yesterday, including some modest speedwork. I was surprised to see that my 200M repeats were comfortable at about 39-40 seconds, though I could feel that my legs still have to make more of an acquaintance with faster effort. Weights went really well too. But last night's sleep was especially short. I finished one assignment at 2 am and then decided to check the news and see who won the Stanley Cup...well, Vancouver lost in more ways than one. It was hard to go to sleep after watching riot footage. I guess I went to bed shortly before 4.

And of course that garbage truck had to arrive--and back up--sometime before 7 am. The apartment building next to us has private pick up and usually I'm up before 7 so the truck has never woken me up before. I can sleep through a lot of urban noise, even most sirens (for a while when I was young, I lived close to a fire station) but the back up beep is diabolically designed. It's the pitch of adrenaline, it slices deep into the amygdala or some other quasi-reptilian brain region and ostomizes terror older than dirt. I used to live behind a club in Montreal that had garbage pickup at 5 am or so--the beep eventually entered my dreams and woke me up even when the truck wasn't there and so I started wearing earplugs to starve the auditory echo.

Surprisingly, we didn't run this morning. I was up in time but I wasn't moving very fast. I think we'll do a few miles this evening, probably mostly walking.

Gotta get working but procrastination waters other gardens: new (probably transient) feature of this blog:

Burning Questions! because I wonder about things.

What (at the molecular level) makes sap and other things sticky? Mainly, other things that get stuck to sap, like dogs.

Why do mobs occur? The riot last night was just an excuse to damage things, but why does this urge exist and why was fulfilling it apparently so satisfying? The conformity of the participants was disturbing; the similar team jerseys and glazed smiles added to the effect of a human plasmodial slime mold, many organisms aggregating to become a single pulsing whole, individuality stripped away. Strengthening human interaction and cooperation is often lauded as positive progress, but there are such deep primordial drives in us all, some of which are horrifically outdated and yet so readily amplified.