Category Archives: sleep

To Nap Or Not To Nap

26 Friday Jul 2019

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About 7:00PM I decided it would be a good idea to take a nap. And it was a great idea at the time. I slept for about ninety minutes.

Now it is 10:39 PM. I am wide awake, watching Family Lapkin pitch a tent on YouTube. Family Lapkin is a show about a young Russian family, husband, wife, young son. They depict their life, which isn’t too different from what young Americans or Brits or Aussies do in their lives. With the sound off you have no idea they are Russian. And we need to target thermonuclear weapons on a couple of twentysomethings pitching a tent?

But I digress. After today’s trip and closeness with J, she wanted to sleep, while watching TV in the process. Not. My. Thing. I did other stuff. Then got tired. Hence the nap.

When I woke up, I fixed her lunch for tomorrow. She may not need a lunch, but I will pack her one. She may work longer than the six hours she is scheduled for. If so, she has to take a lunch break.

I peeled and sliced a peach for her, made her some tuna salad. Should be enough.

The nap was a great idea, but 7:00 PM was too late to do any napping.

“Do-Overs”

22 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by in American History, loneliness, sleep, Uncategorized

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I just saw a headline regarding England’s loss to Sri Lanka in the ICC World Cup match of 21 June. Somebody was grousing about one particular player. England’s captain Eoin Morgan refused to make Mooen Ali the scapegoat for England’s loss. (He is the Captain, for Heaven’s sake. If he won’t stand up for his mates, he has no business being the Captain.)

Morgan Refuses To Blame Mooen For Collapse

“We didn’t deserve to win.”

That pretty much said it all. But somehow, some way, there has to be somebody to blame. Oh please. I’m on my way to becoming an ex-fan of cricket. OK. Stupid commentary is as popular as Sport itself.

That said. It is 2:19 AM. I couldn’t get to sleep. Maybe I’m jazzed up from working out. But last night (Thursday night/Friday morning) I worked out at the same time. Sleep was not a problem. But tonight, sleep had yet to come.

I came back downstairs, put the clean dishes away, moved the dirty dishes from sink to dishwasher. Now I am watching an English urban explorer show us a disused railway line neat Manchester. His Midlands accent is thick enough to slice. But he’s better than anybody on American television.

The people trekking about the countryside in England, America, Ukraine, and other places with metal detectors, or just a simple webcam on a “selfie” stick talking about their corner of the world do so much for improving my understanding of the world. They are true teachers, in my opinion.

I suppose what’s up with me is a true sadness about modern times. So much has been discarded. Some of it, maybe even most of the machines of the past, were obsolete, yet not totally. A passenger train was/is a dandy way to get somewhere. Nostalgia is about the pain of loss. “Progress” is a highly subjective term.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, that delightful film of a few years back was about mourning a lost world. In its fictional way, it was more honest than another film nostalgic for a lost world, Gone With The Wind. The antebellum South was a cruel and brutal world. We all know that. Yet Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel were damn good actresses. They could con us into thinking it wasn’t.

Maybe what we really want in life are “do-overs”. We hope that one day we’ll get it right. The “it” can be a marriage, Thanksgiving Dinner, the England vs. Sri Lanka ODI limited overs match. Sometimes, I think the mind doesn’t know the difference among them. Nor does it care.

Early Morning

12 Wednesday Jun 2019

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It is early around 4:00 AM. I don’t have the shoulder pain or the arm tingling related to the pinched nerve. It is getting better. The low pain/no pain intervals of how I feel seem to be getting longer. I woke up about an hour ago, overheated more than in pain. I had been asleep since around 23:30.

There is all this stuff that needs to be done. Actually it doesn’t strictly need to be done. Nobody is going to die of typhus if I don’t clean the house. I won’t trigger a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia if I don’t sort the mail. The status quo of stagnation will simply continue. That’s the way it is sometimes.

After contemplating my lethargy, sloth and ennui, for a sufficiently long period of time, I stopped staring at Ashland and its railroad tracks and went to fix J’s lunch, chicken salad, cherries and blueberries, a Sargento’s Balanced Break cheese snack, rice crackers, and a Clif© Bar, (peanut butter).

I am back to trainspotting and noting that I am markedly sleepier than I was about two hours ago. I woke up, sat around, wrote a blog post, waited to see some trains go by, did a necessary chore. I took that little bit of drama out, that drama being the feeling of angst that there is something wrong with me or my marriage or the cosmos itself that would disturb me enough to wake me up from a sound sleep.

I just woke up. Now I’m sleepy again. Night, y’all.😪.

Not As Strange.

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Health Issues, sleep

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I had a chaotic dream, the kind that put familiar friends in strange places. I’m in this dream, participating in the action and observing from a neutral point at the same time.

I had thought I was sick with a cold or something. I do have a touch of bronchitis but that isn’t unusual for me.

What I realize is that I am just plain exhausted. I have been more active than I was 60 days ago and my eating habits have changed.

Worry, upset, anxiety are tiring. There is so much I need to detach from. I need to bring my loved ones closer. I wonder, in 1945 and 1946, when families celebrated Christmas together for the first time after World War II, if they cared that much, if at all, about presents. I suspect not.

In short I realize I need to just sleep. It comes fairly easily.

Strange Dream. Strange Day

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

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As is my habit, I woke up early, fixed breakfast,felt tired again, and went back to sleep. I then had a dream, where I walked into a college lecture hall and proceeded to lecture the students. When the authorities finally figured out I had no business lecturing anybody about anything, they turned the microphone off and said The Dean would want to see me. At this point, I woke up, relieved it was only a dream and I would not have to see The Dean after all,

I have been kind of manic all day. I feel angry, tired, or weepy at times, without crying. When I fantasized a Mister Rogers episode where he spays a cat, I figured I had felt crazy long enough.

So I am drinking hot Earl Grey tea and watching Popeye cartoons. Hopefully I will fall asleep early.

Peaks and Valleys

19 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Depression, Sexuality, sleep

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So my mental health has been OK. I don’t know why I call it “mental”. I feel these emotional swings that are noticeable, but not extreme. Just when I feel most hopeless, that feeling dissipates. Right now I am fine.

My sleep patterns are odd. So now, it is 0140,Thursday morning. I should go back to bed. I had a nap around 20:00 Wednesday for about ninety minutes. I thought I was going to sleep the whole night. But I woke up, energized. Now the sleepiness is creeping back.

I miss having a sex life. A little romance might help.

Insomnia, My Old Nemesis

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Love and stuff, sleep

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Why am I up? I was up at 3 AM, for a couple of hours, then back to bed and asleep for ninety minutes. Then Mrs CorC? got up to go to work and I got up to pack her lunch. Now I am awake again. I watched two trains go through Ashland, one passenger, one freight, and several ear wax removal videos.

Yes ear wax removal. Evidently, given their viewership and subscribers, hundreds of thousands of people like to watch videos of people having their prodigious quantities of ear wax removed. Who knew? There are also videos of people having their toe nails worked on by podiatrists, and their blackheads popped. So we denizens of The Global Village have some, uh, idiosyncratic, viewing tastes.

I really should go back to bed. Yet I can’t or don’t want to. I can’t decide. I could turn off YouTube, then go upstairs, and climb back in bed. And yet, the deep yearning in my heart has me up. I long for a caress, an affirmation that love between long-time partners is more than platonic, more than an affirmation of selfless Christian love, agape. People don’t get married to be just really good friends. We get married to get sweaty with our mates, to be aroused and then exhausted.

My feet are getting cold, my back sore. It is time to go back to sleep.

Up.

29 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Catholic Life, sleep

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It is early, 0331. I’ve been awake maybe an hour and a half. I have had the experience when I wake up, lie in bed a bit and sleep doesn’t return, so I “try” harder to sleep. What is that about? If I can “will” sleep, that would make me exceptional as a human. I am not equipped with an ON/OFF switch. None of us are.

I prayed the Rosary. Serenity crept back in. And my eyelids are a little heavier. I did some channel-surfing, and decided I didn’t need to see the same footage of the Wehrmacht on the Russian Front in the summer of 1941 that I had seen many, many times before. So I switched to watching for trains. Maybe a freight will pass through before I go back to bed..

I always have a sense of failure when the wake-ups and insomnia assert themselves. It is as if sleeping is my job. Sleeping is one of my few regular daily activities, along with eating.

5:00 AM. 0500.

09 Wednesday May 2018

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Either way, I am wide awake. Miscellaneous aches and pains, in my shoulder and back, are bedevilling me, prevailing over a deep desire to sleep. I have been up and down since 1:15. When my wife had a nightmare around 3:45, screaming in her sleep, I went back upstairs, thinking I might be lucky enough to nod off. I’m tired now, and think I might be close to sleeping. To me this is the really suck-y part of getting older.

3:00 AM

03 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by in loneliness, sleep

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It is 3:00 AM. I have been awake about forty minutes. I have YOUTube on and I just saw the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, featuring the haunting song of The Doors, The End.  I am in that kind of mood,

Now I’m watching a stripper from one of those campy revival troupes like Cin City Burlesque.  There is a great deal of fun and silliness, and  naive naughtiness to these routines. The antics displayed lighten my mood. 

Upstairs she sleeps.  And my side of the bed is pain. From my back. The sore muscles that never seem to stop aching.  Downstairs is my chair, my cup of decaf, and my imagination fueled by my loneliness.  I actually have the germ of a poem in my head about Christmas and the little things that make it what it is. Maybe tomorrow.