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It's not late yet but it's happening again, I can tell, I won't be able to sleep for a long time yet.

Oddly I slept fine last night even during a wind storm with fifty mile an hour gusts. Dreamed crazy things, though, like I dreamed I was in this Madison Avenue type office in about the early 1960s, and they were doing a clothing drive, and this black lady who may have been a receptionist there, not sure, donated clothing, including this beautiful orange dress, and the white people there thanked the black lady for the box and when she left this old white man said to his secretary, "Take those to the incinerator."

The secretary hauled the box to the basement where the incinerator was, and handed the box over to this black janitor and said, "Burn these."

But the black janitor saw what was in the box, and after the white secretary left he said, "No way, I am taking this home to my lady."

Which made me happy in the dream.

Anyway, during a howling pseudo-gale I slept and dreamed, during a calm night, I am way too awake. But I don't care that much. I can read, pace, think, whatever. That's life. Insomnia is not that major of an affliction. I could have no legs, for example, so it's a comparatively tolerable thing to deal with insomnia.

So tomorrow is the start of the supposed "cruelest month," as that wife-abuser Eliot said, and it's April Fool's Day, which has passed mostly unobserved in my life for the last decade, though my dad and I used to pull pranks on each other for the day.

Maybe it's a coincidence but the cease-fire in the April Fool's Day shootouts we used to have seemed to coincide with my dad's assumption of this stoical (or I guess Stoical with a capital S) outlook in life that I think I can trace to my mom pulling everything she's pulled in his life, taking some of the fun side out of him. He's not ruined or anything but some spark is just missing in my dad and April Fool's Day is a casualty of that.

Truth is I think I miss it more out of nostalgia than as a present-day occurrence, since sometimes things that went on on those days could be aggravating.

I put his basketball court (or whatever you call it....hoop, backboard) on the roof one year, and he once had me take "an important" phone call that turned out to be fake but included me trying to write down these impossible foreign names that ranged from all vowels, to an Indian last name that sounded like a noise a camel might utter if someone hit its groin.

Oh, I guess I could sneak over to Dad's place tomorrow and take everything in his house and put it on a U-Haul and let him come home and think he got robbed, but somehow it's just lost the fun to do things like that. Shrug.

April is not one of my favorite months, and that's just a fact. I know a lot of people like it but where I live you never know what to expect. One day it’s all lovely outside, pink blossoms on the trees, birds singing, the next you’re dealing with severe storms, or even late-season snowfall. If April was a person I think that person would be a teenage girl, maybe fourteen, moody, mercurial, pouty some days, happy others, pretty but always waiting to do something to shock you just for kicks.

Gee, I was never like that.

I’ll take January, because with January you know where you stand. January is like an old man who just wants to watch TV and fall asleep in his recliner while eating his pudding. He turns his hearing aid down, he’s good til after naptime. January is just waiting for things to end, you can tell.

I haven’t done this in here in years, just write whatever, so what else am I going to ramble about before I go hang with my dogs and see when I’ll get sleepy?

Oh, I know, movies. Ever notice Turner Classic really goes all-out for about a month before the Oscars? You can see the most amazing movies then. I think TCM is past its golden age, which died with Robert Osborne, ushering in a new age of overly-talky hosts and an attempt at bringing in apologies for subject matter and language in old movies that doesn’t gel with the standards of now, and whenever possible I try not to listen to the hosts much, just wait them out so I can get to the movie itself.

Like Giant was on the other day and I missed the intro where the host tells about the film, and I liked that, because that way the film can stand on its own merits. Once I even heard a TCM hostess apologizing for some of the content in Meet Me in Saint Louis, and my heart kind of fell.

Makes me wonder what they’ll say about our movies in seventy years.

Well, anyway, it’s after midnight, my dogs want to go outside and….I guess I will take them.

Maybe after that I will write on my book, although if that makes me sleepy, what does that say about my plot?

OK, goodnight or good morning or salutation of your choice. May luck be with you and may Fortune bind the machinations of your enemies.