It’s Friday, but I work tomorrow, so the fact that it’s the last regular workday of the week means little to me.  I hope all of you (or y’all) are looking forward to the weekend.

Thanks for the kind words about my taking the day off from doing any writing or speaking yesterday.  I had a weird Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning, so I was not really up to trying to write anything other than my note about how I wasn’t going to write anything.

I felt a strange surge of somewhat reckless energy on Wednesday afternoon‒possibly because I had finished payroll, possibly for some other reason‒and decided that it might be neat to try to walk all the way back from the office to the house.  It’s 30 miles, so I didn’t expect to be able to make it the whole distance, but I figured I’d get as far as I could and then Uber the rest of the way.  I really meant to do it.

Then, late in the afternoon, my sort of subacute-bordering-on-chronic lower GI discomfort came to a head, and I had to use the head several times in quick succession.  I realized that this would not be a good time to attempt my feat of endurance; I had no wish to be “caught short” on the streets of south Florida…or in some poor Uber driver’s car, for that matter.

So, instead, I waited at the office even after everyone left‒the train also not being a good place for GI emergencies‒and took some Imodium.  By the time everything settled, it was quite late, and so I just slept at the office.

Oddly enough, I slept better there than I usually do, and I half hoped that I might feel pretty good for the day.  That didn’t really pan out, and as you know, I didn’t even feel enough energy to write a post or do a voice recording.  I know I had already said that I’m not sure I’m going to continue this blog at all, but since I have been tending at least to post something on these days, I figured it would be polite to give notice.

It all just seems quite futile, though.  Of course it seems futile.  Everything seems‒and it may turn out to be feels‒that it will undoubtedly looks‒futile.  I don’t see any point in my continued life whatsoever.  I still haven’t gotten or even seriously investigated health insurance, partly because of the very severe tension and anxiety I have about initiating the process, but also because of my lack of desire to protect my health.

I really didn’t expect to be alive to see this year‒I didn’t plan to be alive, anyway.  Several times in the relatively recent past, I made plans to enact the end of my life, but one thing after another has gotten in the way.

I suspect there will be people who will say that I let things get in the way because I didn’t really want to die, and of course, at some level that was true.  I didn’t so much want to die as I wanted to be dead, but since there’s no quantum tunneling-style option, the one has to lead to the other.

I’ve often pointed out that the biological drive to survive can be absurd but is doggedly persistent, and it is very difficult to overcome via conscious thought.  I’ve tried.  I threw away a bunch of things I owned, I gave away some other things, and just in general attempted to put my house in order, so to speak.  I even wrote a draft of a will, of sorts, which I’ve updated a few times since.  But many things got in the way, not least the simple wish not to make things too inconvenient for other people.

And there’s the fact that, as I noted earlier, rather than say “I want to die”, it makes more sense to say “I want to be dead.”  If I had an “off” switch that could just be flipped, that might be the best thing.  But, of course, that’s not how biological organisms tend to operate, and the process of dying tends to be extremely unpleasant, for good, sound, biological reasons.

Sometimes I think if I could just get actual, restful sleep, that might be enough.  The last restful night of sleep I remember happened in the mid-1990s, and I remember it because it was such an outlier.  I was not used to waking up and feeling refreshed and rested and alive.  It was glorious.

Sleep clearly serves some important biological function; probably it serves more than one.  What it does is clearly complex, but I sometimes imagine it as a kind of automated pipe-scrubbing system in some intricate network of steam-punk machinery.  Every day, the system goes into idle, and the pipe-scrubbing/exhaust clearing system goes to work.  But my auto-maintenance, pipe-clearing system is faulty.  It doesn’t ever completely clear out the day’s accumulated debris and grime.

When the system is relatively new‒when one is young‒it’s possible for things to work relatively well, even if all the grime of a given day is never quite cleared away.  But the grime accumulates, the system accrues varying levels of obstruction, its auto-repair doesn’t work as well as it should, and gradually, over time, everything builds up, pipes get leaky, some junctions and connections get severely constricted and some fail altogether, and it gets harder and harder for the system to continue to function well.

People think I’m fairly smart; just imagine how clever I might be if I could just get a decent night’s sleep once in a while.

Probably the lack of sleep contributes to my chronic pain‒and then, of course, the chronic pain contributes to my sleep problems, which is not a paradox, but is actually an almost predictable occurrence in such spontaneously self-assembling, complex adaptive systems with all sorts of internal feedback systems and self interaction and all that.

“For want of a horseshoe nail, the kingdom was lost.”

“For want of the price of tea and a slice, the old man died.”

Oh, well.  Since I work tomorrow, I think I might try my walking home quest after work, then.  I have new socks that I ordered for just such a thing after Wednesday.  It would be cool if they help.  Perhaps I would sleep really well afterwards.  Or, hey, who knows, maybe I’ll get hit by a car (or other vehicle) on the way, and this will all be taken out of my hands.

There are worse things I can imagine.  One of them is simply my life continuing, as it currently is, indefinitely into the future.  The prospect of facing several thousand pounds of rapidly moving metal, perhaps steered by someone who has been drinking, seems much less unpleasant than that other, more banal and yet supposedly desirable alternative.