Man, I’m wasted.

Let me rephrase that.

I’m very, very tired, and have been all day. I drank three cups of tea today, which is two more than my usual consumption.

You know how I said yesterday that events had all the earmarks of giving me one of those nights where I don’t get to bed at all?

Sometimes I scare myself. Turned out I was pretty close.

The flight arrival, originally scheduled for 7:30 p.m., got moved back to 8:30 p.m. A while later I checked the airline website again, and now the plane was expected around 11:00.

And then it was midnight.

Then 1:00.

I finally set out for the airport, at midnight. I figured I’d leave about the same time the plane took off from Chicago, since it takes me about as long to get to the airport on a dirty night as it takes to fly here from the city of big shoulders.

And the weather was dirty. Snow mixed with rain. Slushy highways. I drove around 35 or 40 mph all the way.

When I got there, I found that arrival had been moved back again, to 2:00 a.m.

At that point the regression mercifully ceased. I sat by the baggage claim and read a Dean Koontz (The Funhouse—early work, not his best) until Moloch and Mrs. Moloch showed up, and then I drove them back to my place. By that time they’d been thrown off their circadian rhythms so drastically that they figured they might as well just drive home. The weather had lifted, and the roads were supposed to get better the further south you went.

So I got to sleep at about 3:00 a.m.

For all I know, I have my fingers on the wrong keys and am typing pure gibberish.