I woke up too early

and I knew that I would not be able to reconvene the troops of sleep for the two hours before the alarm. I lay still, with eyes closed, invoking any deity who might be perched over the bed and knew the way back to sleep. Instead, these thoughts were among the two hour parade that passed through my head:

Is it really such a good thing that despite my restless thrashing, this mattress does not transmit any ripples of movement to C's side of the bed? Maybe humans have evolved to need to feel their partner's sleep movements. Maybe this high tech-induced deprivation is the cause of much urban irritability.

I'm in a hospital room seated in a visitor chair between two beds. The friend I am visiting has been wheeled away for tests. In the other bed is a woman who looks like Laura Dern. Her husband arrives. He looks like Patrick Swayze. They have murmured conversation and then ask me if I would be offended if they had sex. I say no and remain in my rather front row seat. He draws the cubicle curtain around her bed and includes my chair within the private space. He climbs up onto the bed and they begin to have somewhat conventional sex. They seem anxious. He looks over at me and says "Please, please join us". We're off to the races.

Which dining room chairs should we use in New York? If it's the turquoise vinyl mid-century modern set, the wooden parts need to be stained black. No. Wait. Make that bleached white. No. Maybe stained honey. like in the fifties. Well there are three of them. Let's do one in each color. Nevermind. There's only three of them, and the table really needs four. How about the Thonet chairs? There's four of them. They need to be taken apart, sanded and urethaned to death. How about the iron and oak theater seats from Provincetown? They need a lot of work, but I love the way they rock slightly when you sit in them, and I've got twelve of them. Mostly in storage. C hates those chairs. I'll have to buy cushions to appease him, but really they don't need it.

Are maggots just the larval form of a critter that then makes some kind of subterranean cocoon and emerges prettier, or is a maggot always a maggot from birth to death? How is it that maggots appear wherever there is carnage? Were they just passing by, and lucky to stumble upon some corpse, or are they always nearby, lurking and waiting for that sniff of decay?