I’m in this half alert , half dreaming state, where I want to stay awake to re-establish some sort of “normal” schedule, in conformity with the habits of most other folk. On the other hand, I could go right back to sleep, enjoying those sleeping hours. By now the morning is shot, if that means doing anything productive. I’ve ordered stuff from Amazon and other online merchants, had some yoghurt and fruit with my coffee, watched some Amtrak trains and a CSX freight pass through Ashland.

I think about the bed. And J. I will sleep with her. Sleep. Younger people, when they “sleep” are planning their futures. A half-century or so in the past, sleeping was about the dream of grandchildren in what is now the present day. This was in the dawn of the Contraceptive Age, where sex was divorced from biology, relegated to pleasure and emotional “wellbeing”. Little did we know we were sowing the seed of loneliness. We were becoming the worker bees in the hive of the governments, the capitalists, and the central planners.

So maybe I won’t go back to bed. I’ll ride out this lethargic limbo, watching empty refuse railcars move through Ashland, to be refilled in NOVA, then sent back to the giant landfill in Charles City County. Some cultures build monuments. We destroy them. We fill giant holes. These trash pits are our archeological legacy. The archeologists of the thirty-first century will speculate over the meaning of our trash pits, in contrast to the monuments destroyed by the barbarians in our midst.

The circle of our time.