It's the Magic Number

[My sleep patterns have been all over the map for a while now. I'd thought that deciding not to take the Bar exam this time around would fix it, but more often than not, any interested party looking at my windows at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning will likely see the soft glow of my bedside reading lamps. (Soft glow provided by what may be my best purchase of 2006, especially when paired with dimmer switches.) The insomnia, if that's what it is, isn't stress-induced as of yore, though. It's because when I get home from work most evenings, I tend to collapse on my bed to read (perchance to snack) and sometimes fail to get up again until it's time to get ready for work. If you happen to fall asleep at nine o'clock or before, waking at four or five ayem means you've gotten enough sleep. I'm trying to decide if this is a problem.]

[Anyway, the upshot is that I've been getting a lot of reading done. This morning, I finished Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's latest. This gets three of his four under my belt, and I plan to get to Flesh and Blood very soon. The man can make sentences sit up and sing. This new novel (really, as the back says, three interconnected novellas) is just as amazing as the others, as well as harrowing and suspenseful.]

[I'm sure someone's written his undergrad English thesis on this already, but one of the things I love about Cunningham is how the number three permeates his books. Both The Hours and Specimen Days take place in three different eras that somehow interact and affect one another, and most of the blood- and found-family units in the three books I've read have three members, with all the stability and instability that implies.]

[I'm not a particularly mystical type, but the number three has always held some sort of fascination for me. Pyramids (which I realize are actually four-sided), tripods, the three branches of the government, "the story of a man named Brady/who was busy with three boys of his own"; in a world seemingly organized around the number two, I always felt there was one more side to the story.]

[Considering the centrality of the Trinity, it's surprising in a way I'm not more attracted to Christianity. But, no; I see all the Abrahamic religions as basically dualistic, good vs. evil, with little gray area. (Oh, confidential to an email correspondent of almost a year ago: No, I don't think Zoroastrianism is the most organic of religions. I think all Manichean worldviews are the result of some Canaanite wannabe patriarch watching his sheep in the desert without a hat for too many days in a row. Polytheism seems to me to be our natural bent.)]

[Where's this going? I don't know. I like the number three. The possibility of exploring one of the ramifications of that number was presented to me last weekend, and then just as quickly retracted, for the time being at least. That's cool, of course, but it did get my imagination buzzing in directions I've been letting lie for a long time now. I read somewhere that, in some system of numerology, two is a fear number. I have too much fear in my life already. It's time to look at other integers.]

[Tomorrow I'm taking part in a different sort of trilateral configuration: my dad, my brother-in-law, and I will be hauling cut wood to the old homestead from a foothill of those Mayacmas Mountains that separate the Sonoma and Napa valleys. My parents mostly heat their house in winter with a plastic-fantastic, '70s-vintage, white enamel, hooded fireplace. They're running low on cordwood, and Dad just acquired a stash. It's supposed to be in the lower 90s up there tomorrow. I'm not thrilled, since I wilt in the heat after all these years in San Francisco. I figure I've been having a gay old hedonistic time the last few weeks, though, so it's time to pay some sort of piper with some hard work. (Who says I'm not a Protestant?) Plus, my dad manipulated me into it like he always does. Where did I put my hat?]

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