It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it. I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way. I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.
I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing. I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”). How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates? Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.
How will such searches of the past even happen in the future? If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot? Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.
Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it. But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.
Online is not forever. Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space. Perhaps far more so. Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.
Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening. I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem. As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me. And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.
I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant. To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now. There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy. There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult. Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.
I don’t want to keep doing this. It’s just not worth it. Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.
<sigh> I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.
***
Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story. Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past. I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.
I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short. Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page. I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started. Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day. It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.
No, that’s dead wrong. It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked). That can’t be just a page a day, can it? Have I been working on this story for more than two months? I can’t remember. If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.
Okay, well, that’s enough of that. I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff. I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started. I’m so tired. This has to end soon. Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?). I only even keep moving at all out of habit. I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.
I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that. Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.
*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel
**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.
***Or the elephants. I’m not picky.
Robert Elessar 
I can picture a compassionate herd of elephants gently carrying you off to some secluded location to sleep. They’d keep watch and be sure no one disturbed you. And when you naturally woke, they’d carry to back to your bench. A new man. Pleasant image, no? Seriously, though, we hear of rock stars being hospitalized for “exhaustion”. How, I wonder, does that come about? Do they collapse on stage and get whisked away by ambulance? Could one present at the local hospital and say, “I’m dying due to a lack of sleep”?
I think rock stars have various complications that make them collapse–sometimes drugs, sometimes not eating enough, sometimes (probably) dehydration and so on. Of course, everyone tends to break at their weakest point, or at least the weakest point that’s subject to repeated pressure and friction (metaphorically), so it will depend.
As for going to the hospital and saying “I’m dying due to lack of sleep”, it’s technically possible, but mostly the problems occur because of sleeplessness, such as increased accidents, decreased resistance to infection, various metabolic derangements, or–perhaps most simply–deliberate self-destructive behavior because life is so damned unpleasant.