Exhaustion

Right now, I'm exhausted. I guess working 18 hour days can get bad pretty quick. 3 in a row. At the end of a 7 day work week. Ending at 3am. Doing manual labor. Yea, this is one reason I'm going to school--so I don't have to do this for the rest of my life. I now have lots of respect for the people who do this on a regular basis just to feed their families; but I digress.

The first day was new and exciting. In a city away from home, demo-ing a badly damaged building into the wee hours of the morning. The second day wasn't too bad, but the second night was the worst. No end in sight. The third--difficult from the exhaustion but knowing that we'd be leaving the next day brought hope. I had the same song stuck in my head, literally for all three days. I would wake up in the morning and the first thing I would do was whistle the tune. It would pop in and out of my head until 3 in the morning when I hit the pillow. 7:30 wake-up, there it was again. Perhaps the work was so mentally un-stimulating that my brain had to think of a way to keep occupied while my body wore itself out. I think it was the last song that I heard before I got out of the truck and started the first work at the job sight--fitting that it would play again on the radio just as we were leaving.

There was no time for recreating and just barely enough to rest. 3 hours the first night, 4 the second and 6 the third. It got increasingly more and more difficult to get up each day, and sleeping, tired though I was at the end of the day, was difficult because once it gets going, your body is hard to slow down. Even as I sat motionless in the truck on the way back, I could almost feel my body gasping up the much needed rest it was finally getting.

Yet, I still find the tiniest bit of energy left in me to press the little keys and spurt a few words onto the page. I need to keep reminding myself that writing is actually invigorating and not draining. It helps bring me to life.