Sleepless Night

Night before last, I couldn't sleep. I lay all night in that strange hypnagogic state where you're completely aware of the external world beyond your closed eyelids, but the passage of time is very distorted.

I hadn't had any caffeine since 8 am the previous morning.

I hadn't had any alcohol.

I was anxious, but anxiety is the matrix in which all of us humans live nowadays. Being alive right now is anxiety-provoking! Nothing is going unusually wrong in my little life, & there was no Horrible Thing awaiting me the very next day that I wanted to avoid.

So, my sleeplessness was a great mystery.

When the first light broke around 6 am, I got up from my bed.

You will simply call them at 9 & tell them you can't come in today, I told myself.

I was amazed by how guilty this made me feel! I mean, it's not like I owe Schlock anything but my labor while my ass is in their chair.

But I did feel guilty! What a horrible failure you are, said the little voice in my head. What a perpetual disappointment to all & sundry.

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This sleeplessness has happened before. Not often—but often enough so that I'm familiar with its manifestation. Usually it happens on nights when I'm anxious about performing the next day.

Thus, it happened during a trip to Baltimore a few years back with a person I didn't know very well at the time (but subsequently became a good friend). Thus, it happened in Ithaca last Thanksgiving when I was about to be trotted out on a round of holiday parties.

It's one of the banes of old age.

Old people just don't sleep very well.

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Anyway, I managed to have a fairly productive day with my ass not in the chair.

In the morning, I polished off Remuneration for one client & got a modest assignment from another. If I'm diligent about husbanding resources, I may actually be in better financial shape this year than I was last.

In the afternoon, I scampered off to the New Paltz Community Garden & puttered. My plot is in surprisingly good shape. Whoever had it before me stayed on top of the weeds, and the soil in those raised boxes looks surprisingly good.

In the late afternoon, I dropped by the Gardiner Bakehouse and spent an hour or so nibbling chocolate chip cookies and reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which is the Big New Novel of the season.

I want to like Sonia and Sunny more than I actually like it. It has some surprisingly good insights:

An arranged marriage story, even one that ended six months later in divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false. Lifting this one story out of all the others made it false.

But I'm finding Kiran Desai's much-praised writing style a bit banal. Her metaphors are pretty word strings but they don't make much sense. And her non-Indian characters make no sense at all.



Claude sent me an email: Are keeping your garden this year . Hope you fine , spring is rite there . Lmk

Claude's spoken English is very good (though it preserves Gallic word order), but he never saw the slightest utility in learning how to write English.

It made me very sad to write back that no, I would not be coming back. I really love the Hyde Park Community Garden, it's just such a beautiful, serene place, and I really like all my fellow gardeners there:



But it's utterly insane to plan on driving across the bridge multiple times each week. The time sink, sure, but also, I don't like driving.

I still haven't decided where I want to move. Ithaca is attractive, but the problem with Ithaca is that just five miles outside the city limits, you're in Alabama except with snow. The Southern Tier is a Trumpy place & getting to anywhere else I might want to hang out (for which read New York City) is a real ordeal from there. Yes, RTT is there, and RTT loves me—but it's not as though RTT would want to hang out with me.

So, I'm also contemplating maybe moving back to Dutchess County. Where I know people. Where I'll be close to Metro-North train stations that can deposit me in Grand Central Station in just under two hours. My old friend Carl A has told me I can stay overnight in the guest room of his apartment on the upper West Side anytime. I should probably take him up on the offer.

Claude wrote me back: It’s sad that u leavin us but we ll keep u in mind for next year u decide to come back . I don’t ve a à person to replace u right now . Stay in touch