And Away She Rides

I'm soaring right now. It's 11:53pm and my eyes want sleep, but inside, inside I'm wired. I've been like this most of the day, neither here nor there, not able to concentrate on any one thing. Spurts of productivity followed by spurts of a scatter shot mind. Tonight's trigger is Carbon Leaf, "Under the Wire," "Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat" and "The Girl and Her Horse." When Dar Williams used to send me flying with songs like "The Ocean" and "Iowa," I used to wonder if certain chords triggered certain states. If there was a correlation between sound and mood. If songs in the key of G were the ones most likely to set me galloping, and maybe those in the key of E, maybe those were the ones that sunk me. Sure, stress, seasonal change, major life changes, these are all triggers, but I swear that my daily triggers are much smaller: music, poetry, books, writing, ideas. I'm two for two today. I'm reading the kind of good, effortless writing that kills, sets the characters off in my head, until I'm doing as much fantasizing about the book as I am reading it. Ten pages read, twenty minute intersessions, lost in make believe and a vast inner world that's all too easy to slip into. And music, if it strikes me, I listen to over, and over, and over, ad nauseum. I can't get enough of the high it sends me on, of the thought of an open road, an open window, wind whipping fresh in my face. It's the runaways, and they're worse at night. Night drives are as much a trigger as the result of a trigger. They're my great escape, my run for the border. Something has to fill me up inside, freedom, miles, lights. And I want one tonight, but Jb can't keep up with me tonight. So I'll lie in bed, good and sweet, and my mind will go 'round and 'round, setting up scenarios, letting characters come to the fore, focusing on phrases, the repetition of words, until words are only sound, and the sounds become foreign, and I keep repeating them, repetition bringing them back 'round to meaning. But there's no sleep in that, not until my body simply gives way, or my mind runs out.