Hello, everyone.  In case you were wondering, no, I did not write a blog post yesterday.  I did not go to the office.  I wasn’t sick, exactly, unless you want to count “sick in the head”, which was most certainly the case, in the sense in which it’s usually meant.  I more or less literally did not sleep at all on Wednesday night, and I was exhausted, but still not really sleepy, by the time arrived for me to get up on Thursday.

I almost wish I could say that I’d gone on some indulgent binge‒alcohol, drugs, casual or even not-so-casual sex, whatever‒or, better yet, that I had been feverishly pursuing some new invention or potential scientific discovery.  Even working on a poem or a song or a short story would have been great; I’ve told you all about how I wrote my short story Solitaire over the course of a deliberately sleepless night, and it is probably my darkest story, though I was pretty happy at the time.

No, I simply could not seem to quiet my mind enough to go unconscious.  There may have been snippets of sleep, such as when I would play some compilation comedy video on YouTube that I’ve seen dozens of times before.  That sort of thing often is able to lull me down into at least a temporary bout of slumber and is much more effective than any rain or forest sounds recordings have ever been.  But Wednesday night they didn’t seem to make me sleep even past the end of the video most times.  Anyway, I was usually too restless even to try one of those.

I don’t know for sure why I had so much trouble sleeping.  I can speculate, of course, and I can come up with hypotheses which are unlikely to be the full story‒for instance, Wednesday was my Dad’s birthday, and I miss him and my Mom (and my former Father-in-law) a lot, I think*, and maybe that was hard to process and kept me awake.  That’s unconvincing, though.

I admit that, in some sense, I often “envy” my parents‒sometimes prosaically, as in admiring the fact that they all had lifelong, successful marriages, but often envying the fact that they are dead.  I’ve said sometimes, mainly to myself, that I want to go be with them, but that’s figurative language.  I don’t actually believe in an afterlife.  To visit them would require a time machine, or a memory that is even better and more concrete than mine is.  But I envy them that they no longer need to try.

I don’t consider death to be a state of rest exactly.  Death is simply oblivion, a final cessation, the end of whatever could experience either rest or toil.  A computer isn’t resting when its power is cut, it’s just off.  Actual rest has a rejuvenating quality, and that would be preferable to mere temporary (or permanent) oblivion.  Maybe if I was able to rest in that way, I wouldn’t feel the yearning for a more final solution.  I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep or relax or let go or rest, so at least oblivion seems like an escape.

It’s not an escape, of course, for escape implies a subject that is escaping, and death makes the subject simply cease to be.

It nevertheless often seems preferable to endless exhaustion without anything else in one’s life to provide a counterbalance.  At some point, there’s got to be a surrender to the notion that, while there will always be momentary fluctuations in the state of one’s well-being, the overall trend is showing no signs of upward movement and, if anything, is sloping downward.

What is one to do, then?  Seeking help, of course, is a major (and probably good) option, but the very thing I discuss in the footnote below seems to make seeking help extremely difficult.  It’s evidently impossible for me to convey to others my sense of true and horrifying (and yet horrifyingly bland) desperation.  I can’t even really grasp how to go about asking, or begging, for help, nor indeed to imagine what anyone is going to be able to do to help me.

I have certainly tried therapy and medications of many kinds, and meditation and self-hypnosis.  I’ve used the crisis hotline in its old and new forms‒once, that led to a very brief hospitalization.  I’ve even tried to find some comfort in religious notions, but the ideas one encounters there tend to be so staggeringly incoherent and manipulative that they make me feel even more depressed.

So, here I go again, “sendin’ out an SOS”, but there’s no one on patrol and certainly no search parties.

I think the worst thing would be if my own kids ceased to be “real” for me.  They are among the only people for whom I have a strong sense of existence, even when they aren’t near or around me.  I think about them every day.  But my son is still, in my head, the young boy with whom I last interacted about 10 years ago.  I’ve seen recent pictures of course, but that’s a form of him that I don’t know‒and I fear I never will.

My daughter is more updated, so to speak.  I interact with her somewhat regularly through texts and emails.  But though I dearly wish I could spend time with them again, I don’t have any idea what I would do if they suddenly came back into my life.  I have nothing‒I am nothing‒worth sharing with them.

Anyway, I got something like my usual three to four hours of (frequently interrupted) sleep last night, and I was still wide awake so early that I decided to take the first train of the day to the office.  And here I am, at the office, finishing this post.  I don’t work this weekend, so I guess I’ll bother you all again on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

*Though perhaps not in the way that most people seem to miss people, at least if you believe their words.  I think I’ve said before that, when I’m not with someone, literally, they don’t feel precisely real to me.  It’s not that I think they actually cease to exist‒I’m far from being such a solipsist.  It’s just that I don’t really feel them when they’re not around.  I can’t imagine what they might be doing, and it doesn’t occur to me to try.  The concept of them is out there, implicit, I suppose, but there’s no “theory of mind” simulacrum of the other person running in the background processes of my brain.  I’ve read some hypotheses that the concept of an afterlife may have arisen from people still having a model or sense or image of a person operating in their mind even after the person dies‒that it still feels to them that the person is present somewhere, somehow.  I don’t seem to function that way.  People are certainly very real to me, and when they’re in my presence they can even be overwhelming, with all their emotions and noise and everything battering away at me; they are all but impossible to ignore or not notice.  But then, when they are not present, they pretty much go away, other than intellectually.  I sometimes wish it were otherwise, but I’m not sure.  This may be part of why I have never wished I could somehow trade places with someone else.  Other people really are other to me, and it’s hard to “feel” them with any depth, though I can write people decently enough.  But then, in a sense, I am in their heads.