…wow.  I’m really tired.  I mean, both mentally and physically, I am very, unusually tired for the morning.  Part of that is due to a particularly fragmented sleep last night, but as regular readers will know, that’s not too unusual for me.  Part of it is no doubt also due to the lingering effects of the respiratory virus I’ve been dealing with for the past week plus, and for which I really haven’t had any rest to speak of, except Sunday.  Part of it is just the general cacophony of people and sound and light that happens at the office and which leaves me feeling, at the end of each day, that I wish I could just spin a cocoon around myself and…I don’t know, metamorphose into the next stage of my life cycle or something.

A lot of it, though, is just that my mental energy, or drive, or enthusiasm, or whatever you want to call it, is just petering away steadily, and some days that lowering level interacts with other factors that make it more noticeable than others.  I guess it’s a bit like a particularly cold day during a gradually oncoming ice age, or a marked dip in the stock market during a more gradual steady decline.

I know, those aren’t really very good similes, nor are they even really apposite.  Is that the right word to use?  Apposite?  Would “pertinent” be a better choice?  In any case, they are both rather contrafactual examples, because the general climate trend for the nonce is toward higher temperatures, not lower ones, and the various forces of the market are more or less engineered such that the stock market will, overall, tend to go up, as it has done now for decades.  Maybe it would have been more relatable to mention a brief upturn in the market, one that is then corrected when things return to their more general trajectory.  But that would hardly carry the message of the fact that I feel unusually tired, would it?

I guess I felt a bit of this tiredness yesterday, now that I think about it; certainly I felt a bit breathless, in general, to the point even where I got out the little portable pulse oximeter that I bought for the office—mainly because it’s cool that we can have such things so cheaply nowadays—and checked my oxygen percentage and my pulse.  They were both well within the range of normal.  In fact, my pulse was better than it usually is.  So I was being a bit of a hypochondriac at that time.

But I do feel tired.  I just want to be able to rest, not to have all sorts of interruptions in my environment, so many intrusions in my personal physical and mental space all the time.  I wonder how much a sensory deprivation tank would cost.  Probably a lot more than I can afford.  Anyway, I don’t know where I would put it.

I’m not sure what else to write today.  I’m just mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually exhausted.  I wish I could just rest.  I probably won’t even have Labor Day off; we’re almost always open at least part of the day during such holidays, since they tend to be good days for sales, as all the appliance stores and whatnot have all seemed to know for as long as I can remember.  But I don’t seem to be able to relax, anyway, no matter what.  I can only “relax” by crashing and burning.  I wish I would just do that, now.  It’s got to happen sometime, but I keep hoping for it and it doesn’t come.

Oh, well.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  But this is probably boring and tiresome for all you reading.  Sorry.  It’s not as though I can lessen my fatigue by spreading it around, and if I could I probably wouldn’t.  That wouldn’t be very nice.  I’ll leave you here, then.

Have a good day.