I was about to jump right in and say something about how I've come to realize that one of my more critical failings is a lack of consistency.  And as I sat here, mentally bracing myself for the plunge, a little word-association dance was jigging about in my skull and out popped what I took to be a counterproductive quote: 

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..."

Instantly, because I hadn't just found the words scrawled on some forgotten bit of note paper somewhere in the jumble of my loose possessions, I became anxious to be able to correctly attribute the words and so I turned to the great as yet unlost library of knowledge of our time.

Ah, I thought to myself with just the right amount of self-scorning smugness (at clearly having forgot something that I had to immediately reassure myself I had actually at some point been able to remember), Ralph Waldo Emerson; not that Thoreau fellow!  Henry David; I didn't have to look that up too, now, did I?  I'd blame any confusion on my advancing years, but honestly, I've never been able to keep certain pairings straight in my recollection.  Like Billy Joel and Elton John--that was one that took decades to properly learn for some quite unclear reason.

The point being that as I ran my glance across the google results to find the man's name, I saw further that not only had I actually misquoted the damn thing, but that apparently, it's an all too common mistake.  The correct, brief and taken out of context quote should read...

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..." 

...and suddenly, it was open to interpretation once more, whether or not these famous words had any bearing on the thought I came here tonight to express.  I still haven't stopped and given a moment's thought as to the answer, lost as I've been in all these tangential meanderings; but I'm hesitantly leaning towards, "Yes, I believe they do."

But to put my original point even further off, I then was struck by the absurdity of the whole thing, came up with that snappy little title up there, and decided that since the whole idea (all of it, original, tangents and all) boils down to just bluntly ramming the unfiltered truth down your throats, I'd allow everything you now see above these very words; everything you've read up to this point, assuming there's even just a single "you" out there still reading at this point.

So, it's now 7:20pm here in southern California, and I am again sipping on a rather sizable Scotch on the rocks as I sit here typing, and I have once again managed to pull a completely unnecessary and uncalled-for all-nighter, and am finally feeling somewhat "normal" up inside my brainmeats.  To be honest though, seeing as it takes me such unhealthy and illadvised measures to reach this state of mind, I don't rightly know if I can keep thinking of the state as feeling "normal".  When I say that I am right this moment feeling "normal," what I mean is that I feel the way I think I used to feel back when I wasn't feeling the way I usually feel these days.  In other words, I suppose, I feel the way I used to feel back when I concurrently acted in such a way that no one seemed to think there was anything at all the matter with me, when I felt more a functioning member of society, when I was more or less happy with the general scheme of things in my life that is.

Whew!  The only trouble with all this (and here, finally, it comes) is that it is horribly, undeniably inconsistent.  When I was consistently feeling this way, everything was tolerable to acceptable to even most things bordering on or crossing over into enjoyable.  I could get up out of bed the moment consciousness first returned (and usually this would be during morning hours too!), and feel a normal, healthy appetite for meals and conversation and such, and even be up to facing and dealing with the more irksome parts of everyday living.  I would feel there weren't enough years left of my life, not enough days in any of those given years, and most certainly not enough hours in any one of those given days.  And so, even though my attention was torn five different ways at the conclusion of each night, I'd still manage to talk myself into going to bed at something approaching a reasonable hour so that I might get up and do it all again the next day.  My mood didn't seem to change too drastically one way or the other, at least so far as I could discern them. 

And so, having been continuously conscious for a goodly thirty or more hours now, I feel distinctly similar to how I seem to remember feeling during that sort of period.  The problem seems to be that this feeling only returns to me after I've deprived myself of sleep this way, that it is unhealthy for me to try and do this to myself too often (or maybe even at all), and that as a result, it's just not consistent.

Also, meditating upon the apparent loss of some of my closer friendships over the years, I think one of the more glaring commonalities is again, a lack of consistency.  When things are good in my head, I seem perfectly capable of maintaining (sustaining?) friendships and relationships of varying degrees of closeness.  When things are not as good, I seem to instantly withdraw, sometimes very deeply into myself, and for all that I can clearly see it is harming these relationships and as much as it pains me to be perfectly aware of the process, it is only in these brief moments that I feel capable of trying to do anything to reverse the damage.  This last time around though, I think the inconsistency may have even begun at the opposite extreme; I think I may have been further "up" than "normal" before heading down to where I am lately, making me even more inconsistent than I used to be...if that makes any sense.

While I'm on a roll with the unabashed honesty thing, I'll go back to my google tangent to add that when I sought out the attribution of my misquote, all I bothered to type into the search field was the word "consistency" itself.  At that point, google went ahead and made its many suggestions of which I then chose "consistency is the hobgoblin".  Furthermore, I wanted to blame an old Reebok commercial for putting the wrong wording into my head in the first place; I seemed to recall a commercial from sometime in the late 80s, combining the chopped quote with others about nonconformity and suitably edgy imagery and music.  Then, when I went to confirm the Henry Davidness of Thoreau, I spelled his damned name "Thorough," though I did actually get the Henry David right in memory.

Oh, and since there is the internet after all, I just searched "reebok consistency hobgoblin" and found this.  Take that, Reebok; U B U indeed!  [edited for even more increased consistency]

It's just about the end of an unusual night; more on this later though.  Until later rolls around, look what I happened to find:

"If a small thing has the power to make you angry,
does that not indicate something about your size?"
     --Sydney J. Harris

"Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."
     --Frank Outlaw (Charles Reade?  Ralph Waldo Emerson?  The Buddha?)

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: 
the only ones among you who will be truly happy
are those who will have sought and found how to serve."
     --Albert Schweitzer

I found these random quotes scrawled on a piece of note paper maybe an hour ago, quite by accident.  I'd scribbled them there sometime in the last four years, and they've been floating, forgotten all this time.  At this point, I don't recall where or how I'd stumbled upon them originally, but like so many coincidental bits of wisdom I've squirreled away, their significance only now seems to be emerging.  Am I ripening to them in some way?  Regardless, I'm glad I managed to hold onto them till tonight.

warning:  another, dull, self-absorbed post ahead

as i was going about what has become my usual getting-ready-for-bed rituals, i ran into a not unexpected snag when my laptop failed once again to boot properly.  i think it may have something to do with my too casually installing windows vista sp-1; whatever.  so, after starting up the restoration process, i hesitantly opened up my copy of augusten burroughs' magical thinking to help pass the time until i could get online, read up on my subs here, check emails and whathaveyou.

admittedly, i had no idea what to expect from this book.  i'd attempted reading his running with scissors, but only managed to get halfway through before putting it back on the shelf and forgetting about it.  so i cracked open magical thinking and dove right in, waiting for my computer to set itself right.  turns out it can sometimes be a lengthy process.

but this time, before i had a moment to notice how much time had gone by, the thing was up and running again.  only, instead of putting the book down to attend to my computer affairs, i shut the machine down, got in bed, and kept on with the reading.  it had been a while, relatively, since i'd had the pleasure of immersing myself in the simple escape of a book. 

hours blinked by as the page numbers increased to my continual amazement.  the thing is comprised of these mostly brief little essayish vignettes (which made it hard for me to say to myself with any convincing self-discipline, "okay, that's enough for tonight; put it down now"), starting with a few childhood experiences and ending in a bunch of passages about his marriagelike relationship and some random annecdotes about the sort of fame a published writer experiences.  i know this because i ended up reading the entire thing by the time the sun rose. 

somewhere, maybe about halfway through, when i realized i'd crossed the threshold and knew i wouldn't be putting it down till it was done, it occurred to me that i had more or less cracked up, nearly laughing out loud despite the indecency of the hour.  i spent a good hour or so thumbing back and forth through previously read pages, searching in progressive desperation to find the bit that had done this for me.  for some reason, it had become an urgent matter that i locate the lines that had brought me back to sincere and actual laughter.  i think i wanted to record and share them here.  but i couldn't pinpoint them with any assurance.  i settled on two moments that might have been what i was looking for, then realized that the search was futile.  maybe it was some synergistic effect, only to be found in the moment, or only there at first reading.  i decided it didn't matter so much in the end, and resigned myself to laying there in bed and reading till there was nothing more to read.  as always with such sessions, i finished up with the "praise for" blurbs between the front cover and the title page.

at that point, i wasn't feeling particularly sleepy, so i rummaged among the few other books that had recently emerged from my randomly packed boxes.  i guess i just didn't want to lose the feeling.  i grabbed three likely candidates, crawled back into bed, and read some more.  i suppose i might not have slept at all, but the sounds of my father rising to get ready for work somehow convinced me that i should finally put it all aside, turn out the light, and relinquish consciousness.  besides, the next book just wasn't the same.  i'm not gay, and i hardly had the sort of messed up childhood that burroughs managed to survive, but i still felt there was so much there to which i could easily relate.  and, damnit; the guy had basically gotten me to laugh again!