I had just closed my eyes when the alarm went off, spurting some insipid top-ten song into my barely awake mind. 6:30 AM, no light had begun to bleed out the night sky. In any city all he light thrown off tints the sky an unpleasant shade of orange-pink; a color that causes me to think of nuclear winter, the end of the world. It was by this light that I padded barefoot to the shower.

Cleaned and Shaved, the experiences just barely eeking past my sensory register and into thought and memory. While in the shower I was able to calculate the amount of sleep I relieved last night: roughly two hours. A warm shower can't shake the feeling of my limbs being cast in lead with powdered glass in the joints.

With a breakfast of Rice Chex and Supercoffee singing in my gut as I ventured outside and scraped my car out of the muck it had frozen itself into overnight. Made the trip to work with Propellerheads pumping from the car stereo—waking me up like no coffee can. I glimpsed a lovely sunrise blooming above the city in my rearview mirror. It's been a while since I've seen one of those.

Work was work, my workload being reduced due to the morning hours. At lunchtime Beautiful Girl brought me some sushi and I fell in love all over again simply because of this. Toasted my sinuses with copious amounts of wasabi and gobbled down my salmon rolls.

The evening was consumed by a trip to Beautiful Girl's parents' house where we dined on stew and sampled various dusty bottles of liqueurs from cordial glasses, getting a little giggly in the process. They got me a Christmas present: a beautiful glass dragonfly (someone let slip my fetish). Their gift—a bottle of authentic North Country apple wine—still rests in my closet in the Frozen North gathering dust.

Two hours of sleep is too little, even for me. Today wasn't too bad, but I can feel the lack of sleep catching up to me, slowly crawling up onto my back and squeezing my temples. Blonde on Blonde is playing softly on the stereo. Tomorrow is the trip home, a straight burn west on the Super Slab on the Saturday before Christmas. I must be careful to pack many excellent mix tapes and underwear to spare.