The ability to sleep deeply and well is, I suspect, the difference between happiness and angst.

These next weeks I am on a quest to achieve a sleep from which I awake on the lighter side of that duality.

The last few years have damaged me but as of today I am entering into at least a few weeks of, what I hope to be, recuperation. To be more precise, I don’t have to go to work for at least a month and I can still afford to pay rent and eat as well. This halcyon combination may not last but if forced to choose I will buy food and re-enter the homeless state rather than return to the conditions under which the damage occurred.

This choice may not be necessary but it has become clear to me what I simply cannot tolerate and remain something I recognize as myself.

This is good to know.

Today is the first set of moments after intense pain. These little bits of time are bubbles in a field and each pearly globe contains some effluvia, some exhalation of illness. They burst occasionally, and I waft through the miasma, but mostly today has been the mild haze-pain of the field itself, the bubbles remain largely at a distance, beautiful and alien. The world feels like it is an iridescent garden whose main fruit is inedible.

And it’s hot. So here at the coffee shop sitting in what shade is available, there is a thin skin of sweat on my nose and upper lip. The combination is almost ecstatic. If I move wrong the pain re-members and I feel as if I have been lifted and simultaneously flattened into something resembling a Mary Callery statue.

And tomorrow I am supposed to return to work.

From The Daily Dish

Neuroscientists are beginning to identify the specific deficits that define the psychopathic brain. The main problem seems to be a broken amygdala, a brain area responsible for secreting aversive emotions, like fear and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad. Aggression doesn’t make them nervous. Terror isn’t terrifying. (Brain imaging studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is activated when most people even think about committing a “moral transgression.”)

This emotional void means that psychopaths never learn from their adverse experiences: They are four times as likely as other prisoners to commit another crime after being released. For a psychopath on parole, there is nothing inherently wrong with violence. Hurting someone else is just another way of getting what they want, a perfectly reasonable way to satisfy their desires. In other words, it is the absence of emotion–and not a lack of rationality–that makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible to them.

I think I am going to read Snakes in Suites: When Psychopaths Go to Work.

I also think I want to get a copy of Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. The results will be interesting regardless of their outcome.

Well it was shit.  I just got out of the hospital. The pain did not go away on Sunday.

So much for my career as a health prognosticator.

(BTW – the pain is gone now but I caught a cold in the hospital. That last bit actually makes me giggle.)

I was just able to have a shower and wash my hair without pain (my hair is very long and washing it is no mean feat). And my body is making weird ass noises. I think this episode of pain is nearing its end. Just in time for work! Oh joy.

(Odd what pain does to a mind. I can’t believe I just wrote about my body’s funny noises. Bleh.)

Dr. B be warned. I am coming to your office tomorrow and I am not in a jovial mood.

This more or less constant illness is a pain in the ass.  Still, it seems to me that it has taught me something about limits.

I had agreed, several weeks ago, to man a telephone for a charity telethon today. So I got up and went.  I had to think about how best to negotiate the particular possibilities of this illness so I stopped at the grocery store first thing and got something to drink and some plain buns to 1)keep the hunger at bay and 2)not upset my system any more than it already is.  I took the car, because long rides on public transit are simply too risky at the moment. And it worked for the most part. The nasty pains were kept at bay and all I had was the occasional, and manageable, cramp.

This compromise seems to me to be the key. I cannot just ignore the limitations this thing has set upon my life but I cannot let it rule me either. So I push, I hope intelligently, against the boundaries it has set for me.  One hopes that once this thing is fixed that I retain the lesson. I suspect it will be useful if generally applied to my life.

So I after my largely sleepless night I went to work. Walking down the hill to the bus wasn’t bad, in fact it felt good to be out in the incredibly warm (for January) air. I could feel the tiredness buzzing in my head but I thought tea or coffee (or both) would help that. I vowed to take a pill if I had any problem sleeping that night.

I got through most of the day more or less without incident and if I’d stopped at the soup for lunch I would have probably been OK. But I didn’t. I ordered an egg salad sandwich as well, with lots of vegetables. I ate the soup and then half the sandwich and within minutes the abdominal pain started. Exhaustion proves to be some sort of vulnerability amplifier. The pain was mild, so I went back to work and threw away the other half of the sandwich. The pain grew a little as I worked, but I thought it might settle with nothing else added to my system.

Between the tiredness and the pain, I did not stay late. The minute my time was up I shuffled out to the train. The walk home was nothing like the walk down the hill in the morning. The weather was still lovely, a few spitting rain drops, the smell of damp earth — the world was fine, but every step increased the pain.

When I got home I went straight to bed and struggled with sleep, exhaustion, pain and nausea. By evening, with the aid of a sleeping pill and antinauseant, sleep managed to win the battle.

It’s 09:30 the next morning, and the pain is largely gone. Still, no food yet; I think I’ll try soup later, if the pain stays away. Definitely no sandwiches, nothing solid, nothing with fiber.

Exhaustion is such a powerful thing and sleep it’s only antidote, so if it doesn’t come, all is screwed.

So yesterday’s cartoons were partly correct. I did feel like a frazzled cat by the end of business, but the works below by Zhiwan Cheung are a bit more accurate. The first: how I felt by yesterday evening before sleep finally bore me down.

At the moment I feel more like this:

It’ll be interesting to see what happens by the end of the day. The thing about moving through extremes of delight and exhaustion is that life is certainly interesting.

The project is online.  I put in a few days as a bug-finder and then left that to the rest of the users.  The bug fixing is for the bug-fixers. At that point, I asked for, and was granted, several days off (5 in a row). I went home, went to bed and woke up sick. Normal for me after a period of over-work. I spent the first three days taking a few tottering steps outside and the rest in bed. Last night was the blow-out headache.

This morning I feel much better. So expect to hear more from me shortly.

In the last few weeks I have been rather ill and as a consequence I have been inside for much of that time. This morning, when I went outside just for the sake of being outside, I realized how much of a toll living in has on me.

You should understand that at various points in my life, starting when I was a teen, I have lived out.  I spent a couple of years on the road as a kid, just wandering around the country. Technically, I suppose I was homeless, although I could have gone to my mother’s house had she not been such a madwoman.  I have to tell you that it was not terrible. I was not suffering, in fact they were wondrous years full of discovery and learning.  As an adult I have lived in cars and vans (with children and pets) for long stretches of time. These were not terrible years either and both my children are better people for it too (even according to them). This is what I call living out.
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