Blessed sleep, freewrite

I am almost narcoleptic now, catatonic, somnbulent even. A serious lack of sleep deprivation even, but the show must go on. Despite a profound lack of sleep, the night before a big day when I need to sleep most, sleep abandons me and leaves me out to pasture, counting sheep, until I want to sucker punch the woolly apparitions.

Not that I actually count sheep, but as a child, I tried, and no matter how much how I visualized them, queuing them up in order to get them running fast enough to build up enough steam to clear the log fence, was a nightmare. Try herding sleep sheep sometime. They’re absolutely unruly. You need a sleep sheepdog. If anything, the process gets me so riled up, I could kiss any fleeting hope of getting some blessed sleep goodbye.

Then the damn things won’t shut up with their baahing like goats with an occasional basso profundo ewe chiming in with her bleating lambs, not exactly chiming, no bell, she. Not even the bell of the ball.

We stopped on Coleman Valley Road overlooking the sea to watch a gang of lambs playing on the hillside, each one shoving the other off the ledge. None could keep still for more than two seconds. They’ve been alive for less than two months. They gambol about with such energy.

Sonoma county sheep are born in January in February so they’ll be ready for Easter dinner. Little fresh guys, youngsters, rowdy, and on the move. No clue as to what’s in store for them. Not blessed, sheep, but blessed sleep. Forever and a night, will they count dinners jumping over a dinner table for an eternity to come?

324, 2007? Writers’ Group