I am in a foul mood this morning, dear reader…foul!  I woke up this morning in the kind of mood that makes small children cry and grown mean cross to the other side of the street – an existentially foul, sleep-deprived snarl of a mood – because I made the catastrophic tactical error of letting the puppy sleep in the bed.  A choice that, in the moment, felt like benevolent paternal bonding but in practice became a kind of canine waterboarding session conducted in hourly installments.  Starting at 01:00, the little beat launched a precision-engineered campaign of nocturnal harassment: toenail scritching, repositioning with the subtlety of a bowling ball, and the occasional full-body flop that suggested she believed gravity was optional.  The coup de grace arrived at 04:45, when a warm, unapologetic tongue made direct contact with my inner ear canal, a sensation so profoundly violating it should be classified as at least a misdemeanor in California.  Everything else is illegal here, might as well add this to the pile.

And but so anyway, in this state of bleary, half-feral irritability, I remember that today marks the death of Mary Shelley – who, unlike me, managed to produce world-altering literature while presumably getting more than ninety consecutive minutes of sleep.  She died in 1851 at the age of 53, taken out by a brain tumor, which feels cosmically unfair given that she’d already gifted the world Frankenstein, the primordial ooze from which all modern science fiction crawled.  She was eighteen – eighteen – when she conjured the monster during that infamous ghost-story challenge at Lord Byron’s villa, while the rest of us at eighteen were barely capable of coherent thought, let alone inventing a genre.  Shelly was a literary titan disguised as a human, a woman who understood ambition and monstrosity and the terrible of loneliness of creation long before the rest of us caught up.

I have a brain tumor, too.  It’s external, weighs about 6 lbs., is shaped uncannily like a chihuahua and is attached to my hip with the clingy devotion of a barnacle that’s read too much self-help literature.  It’s not fatal, but it can be loud, and it is responsible for the fact that I am typing this with the emotional stability of a Victorian ghost.

I hate this goddamn dog right now.

The calendar, in its infinite appetite for chaos, also reminds us that February 1 marks the first proven murder committed by Ted Bundy in 1974.  Proven being the operative word, since Bundy’s whole biography is basically a Choose Your Own Nightmare of unconfirmed horrors.  On this night, he broke into the basement apartment of Lynda Ann Healy in Seattle, bludgeoned her unconscious, and abducted her.  Her remains wouldn’t be found for a year, a grim punctuation mark on a story that was already too bleak to bear.  Bundy is the kind of guy who forces you to confront the abyss with no guarantee the abyss won’t wink back.

And honestly – given my current state of sleep deprivation – I’m starting to suspect that Bundy’s entire homicidal career might have been catalyzed by a dog that wouldn’t let him sleep either.  I’m not saying it excuses anything (it does not), but I am saying that after being woken up every hour on the hour by a creature who weighs less than a Thanksgiving turkey, I understand how a person’s grip on sanity can begin to fray like a Temu extension cord.

I just burned my tongue on the tea.  Fucking dog.

Which brings us back to the present moment, for good or ill: me, the puppy, the lingering psychic residue of Mary Shelley’s genius, and the grim anniversary of Bundy’s first confirmed atrocity.  All braided together in the strange, sleepless braid of February 1.  Honestly, after the night I’ve just endured, I’m starting to understand the primal murderous rage that can brew in the heart of a man denied the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness.  Just saying, if I see one more dog-shaped shadow, or hear one more soft, wet sound, somebody’s gonna pay.  And it won’t be me.  Or Mary Shelley.  Or, probably, Bundy.  But someone.  Someone will pay.

Okay, fuck it: the puppy is snoring again.  I’m wide awake.  The monster in my head is probably just caffeine withdrawal and sleep debt, probably.  But if it starts whispering in German about galvanism and reanimation, I’m calling it quits and moving to Geneva.  Or at least to the couch.  Maybe I’ll sleep, maybe I won’t.  The hour hand keeps moving either way.

N.P.: “Sellf Help” – Offbeat, Greg Blackman