Friends, it is now 21 May, the Year of Our Lord 2014, 5:10 PM Mountain Standard Time. I am sleep-deprived, owing some to attendance at three scheduled-when-I’m-normally-asleep meetings in four days, owing some to disorganization, owing some to inability to sleep at will. With the sleeplessness is a creeping despair, exemplified by the fact that the original working title of this post was “The Future Futility of Human Existence.”

Usually the moral of the story comes at the end, but here it is now: “Get good sleep, or you will be sorry.”

The above image is a great mashup of The Thrill of Victory and The Agony of Defeat. A still life of plate, chair, spoon, table and floor provides the background. The spine of a triple acrostic is at upper right; of a septuple acrostic, from top midleft to bottom right; of a quintuple acrostic, from bottom left to bottom midright. The crucial middle words of the septuple and the quintuple have been determined, and I know from experience that that’s the hardest part. I know that sooner or later, with patience and some research, I’ll eventually have the poems that will complete the acrostics, and I will have done something that represents the utmost in what I can do in this peculiar genre I’ve plumbed for more than seven years.

But I also “know” even if I expend that effort to the tune of hundreds of hours, draw better than I ever have before for the final incarnation of the image, and dress it in the perfect frame–that it will have been a waste of time.

I put “know” in quotation marks because I suspect that that’s the sleep-deprivation talking.

It’s now 5:27 PM, MST. Time to wrap this up and get as much sleep as I can before clocking in at 11.

Sleep well yourselves, Friends…