sleep fringes

[dragonlady7]

I've developed the bad habit of not getting out of bed precisely when I wake up.

I used to roll over and rub my eyes as I woke up my computer, the moment I was barely conscious, and starting to work right away. Now I lie in bed until my eyes don't stick shut anymore.

The problem? Besides all the time this wastes, that's when I have weird, weird dreams.

This one wasn't really a dream, but was nearly one.

This morning I was lying there, half-imagining a difficult scene I'm going to have to write in the fiction I'm working on, and my mind kept drifting. (I used to compose all my scenes while I was lying in bed, before I wrote them. As I get older this works less well, but I still try it.)
I wound up thinking about the draft, and wondering whether I'd protest it if the US reinstated it. It's not fair to only take the men, and it's not fair that it's not random, and it's not fair that those who must die to enforce the policies of unpopular presidents are so predominantly lower-class. But really, if you're doing OK and you're in college and you've got your internships under your belt and you're going to go off and get a good job, why the hell would you join the forces? And if you're unemployed and you dropped out because you weren't going anywhere and you have nothing but a life of poverty staring you in the face and you're stuck in a dead place with no new jobs, why the hell wouldn't you join the forces and get out?
Mind you, I only really closely know four people in the Army, and all of them have at least some college. My father has his master's degree; Katy and Adam are both college graduates. Sean is the lowest-ranking of them, the only enlisted man I know, and even he has his Associate's. All of them made the choice to join the Army with open eyes. But for Sean it was definitely an escape from an economically depressed area in which he had a limited future.
And I was pondering that, and then I was thinking of the systems they have in Norway and Germany and so on where young men are required to serve for 2 years, and I remembered the German ambulance driver I met in Greece who told me that if you didn't believe in war then you could do other public service work instead of the army, and then for some reason I began to think about the explanation my father gave of who the Marines are, and of how they're not really necessary anymore because we don't really do amphibious assaults anymore, and then I was thinking of the young Marine in Iraq who threw himself on a grenade and died...
And I drifted off to half-sleep gradually through this whole thought process.
I was thinking of what a grenade would do to a body.
And suddenly, outside, a mourning dove called-- coooo-eeeeee, coo, coo coo.
And I was certain that when I opened my eyes I would be in the little blue bedroom on the southeast corner of the second story of my parents' house, with the birdfeeder below the east window, and the 50-foot hedge of maple trees sighing just beyond it to the east.
I opened my eyes and of course I was in the little pink bedroom on the northeast corner of the first story of the Kleinschmidt's house, with a pair of spider plants in old cream bottles sitting on the windowsill, and my fitted sheet perpetually untucked from the corners of the mattress it doesn't fit.
And I didn't know whether I was disappointed or not.