Hence me writing this now, even though it's going to be published on Tuesday, because otherwise my weekly blog post will be posted at stupid o'clock at night, and I try not to do that too often.
Gotta give the people what they want, at an hour when they might be awake to read it. And I'm just going to make the crazy assumption that a trip into the weird side of my subconscious is what you want, because why the heck else would you click on a blog post with this title?
This won't be the last blog post I need to write tonight, either. Heaven help me.
For the current state of my to-do list, and the fact that so much of it is not done at this time of night, I partly blame a semi-accurate replica of a Star Wars rebel pistol I drew, a conversation about poop, and an imaginary pet rat with a prophecy attached.
Welcome to my Sunday night.
Maybe I need to start a trend like Thinspiration, but instead of giving people self-destructive diet advice, it's sensible and healthy and aimed at knuckleheads like me who consistently stay up too late.
"Do you want an extra hour of art time tonight, or sixteen hours of not feeling like crap tomorrow?"
But that's a topic for another blog post. Back to the stupid night I had because of something I drew and a couple conversations I had.
Once upon a Monday night...
Yes, it was still Sunday night, and the entirety of Monday was still ahead of me. Not that I remembered that.
In the bizarre hellscape my mind had decided to create, it was Monday night, I hadn't slept a wink on Sunday night, and my ENTIRE Monday to-do list was still not done.
And now I couldn't sleep.
Great, I thought, now I'll have to do all of my Monday work on Tuesday, with TWO sleepless nights behind me.
Ha. As if that was the worst bullcrap my subconscious could come up with on that particular night.
Enter the perilous pregnant pet rat of prophecy.
Apparently, for the mind of an author who writes a lot of angst, the appropriate response to my brother saying he was thinking of getting pet rats was to add said brother into my dream, and have him tell me that he'd had a vision where I was killed by a rodent and/or something else.
I forget what the something else was. The something else wasn't what came into my imaginary dream bathroom while I was taking an imaginary dream crap, and have imaginary dream babies all over the floor by way of splitting open and just unceremoniously dumping them out.
Never mind the fact that my brother was planning to get male rats, and have no females involved specifically to avoid the possibility of babies.
If mpreg body horror is what it takes for my subconscious to fulfill its fictional prophecy, that is what it will stoop to.
Such terrible literary standards. Subconscious, I'm disappointed in you.
Now, as for the improbably birthed litter of death-babies on my floor, I should mention now that I'm not normally afraid of rats.
But when they're involved in a prophecy that ends in my death, and they just came spilling into the world chestburster alien-style, my irrational dream self has a hard time bringing herself to touch them, climb off the toilet while they're in the room, or otherwise risk drawing aggro.
So there I was, trapped on my toilet by a bunch of possibly diseased rat babies who were theoretically going to kill me because my brother had had a prophetic dream within a dream.
My version of Inception is so much less cool than the movie.
Now, not only was my to-do list not done, but I couldn't go to sleep until I'd somehow managed to get rid of every single rat, preferably without touching them.
At least the rats weren't werewolves, right? HA.
At this point, art took a break from imitating life long enough for life to imitate art by dragging me into wakefulness for a trip to the real bathroom.
At least I didn't dream I was peeing and act accordingly while still in bed, so I suppose I should count my blessings.
Admittedly, that kind of math is hard to do when you have a long to-do list for tomorrow, and you just woke up after four hours of sleep, with a low probability of getting back to sleep in time to avoid having several extra hours of work due to sleep-deprivation-induced slowness.
To my surprise, after I'd finished shambling to and from my prophecy rat-free bathroom, it only took a little over an hour of tossing and turning before I managed to re-enter the absurdity my subconsciousness had decided to weave for me.
Once again, there were furry animals and echoes of a real-life conversation involved. Only this time, as you probably guessed from the headline, the animals were werewolves, and the conversation was about poop.
Did you ever take a crap so big that your pants fit better? Apparently a friend of mine did, and he felt the need to tell me about it.
I also felt the need to show him a semi-accurate drawing I'd made of a Star Wars blaster pistol.
Both of these things are fine by me.
The fact that my mind decided to blend them into a werewolf infestation in my basement, when the only weapon I had was a crappy little blaster pistol that was designed to break up unflushable poop rather than giant carnivorous creatures of the night, was not.
And you know what?
As if that wasn't bullcrap enough, it was STILL Monday night in my dream, Monday's to-do list was still not done, and now I couldn't go to sleep until I dealt with the damn werewolves.
I wasn't even scared. I was just so annoyed that the werewolves wouldn't let me go to bed.
Kind of like that time when I dreamed that my paraplegic cat was going to take over the world, and my biggest fear was that, in the process of dragging himself across the globe, he would accidentally lose his diaper.
My dream self has some interesting priorities.
Eventually, my alarm clock rescued me from my nonsensical fantasy dreamscape.
By "rescued", I mean it dragged me into a real world where I had 20 minutes to haul my sleep-deprived self out of bed, visit my rat-free bathroom to take a dump that would hopefully not require a sci-fi weapon to get rid of it, and throw some leftovers in the toaster oven before it was time to get to work.
Almost 12 hours later, here I am, finishing up tomorrow's blog post, with another post still waiting to be written, because apparently I have strange priorities even when I'm awake.
Why am I sharing this with you?
Because I needed content for my blog post, it's late at night, and I'm getting revenge on my subconscious by sharing its crappy flash fiction with the world.
Also, if I have to deal with my dream world's bad werewolf fic and poorly-implemented fictional prophecies, so do you.