It’s long past time to get off.
Seriously.
Today it dawned on me that I just can’t keep on going like this.
- No friends.
- No activities.
- No creative work that makes one damn bit of difference.
- No job.
- No way to get a job.
- No one who cares.
Gotta find some place for the li’l dog, and then get outta here. Time to jump off the (un)merry-go-round.
Up to Young Dr. Kildare’s office today. Nothing very cheering there. He’s long gone. His partners (or whatever they were) are pleasant enough but don’t know me from Adam’s off ox. And why should they?
Stuck, they are, on the outer fringe of drearily bourgeois Moon Valley. They count the hours and the minutes to the end of the day, when they can lock the door and head outta there.
Moon Valley: where my dear and now extinct friend Elaine took up residence with her aging and sickly husband. They’re both dead now. He died of the cancer that had decided to eat him up after they moved to the Moon Valley house. She hung around for awhile, bouncing from condo to condo, and then moved back east where her kids were. Soon thereafter, she also croaked over.
My son is the only person left who cares whether I live or die, and his nose is stuck to his employer’s grindstone. He has no time so spend with an old woman.
{chortle!}
Amazing, how sorry you can feel for yourself at 2:00 in the morning~
Hey Funny. Your posts are the first I look for every day. I have followed you for many years and even have one of your books! I love your humor and energy and look forward to your adventures. I feel a bit like a stalker, but I’m 70 now and live somewhat vicariously 😁. Know that your writing bring joy to this internet friend. TY
I have come to the conclusion that waking up prematurely at 2, 3, or 4am is BAD for my health! It’s always darkest before the dawn. That’s what I tell myself as I lay there in bed ruminating on the mistakes I have made in this life and whether or not I am attentive/loving enough as a person in general. I am very independent (I had to be from a very early age) and I am a survivor (I survived my upbringing, specifically my father). I do the best I can. I’m sure YOU have done the best you can. Enjoy the life you have left, dear lady! It is truly a miracle that we are here on this planet, living this spectacularly imperfect life, and we will shuffle off of it soon enough without any extra help. I started relearning French, I used to be fluent but haven’t had any use for it here in the States. Then I’m going to Paris because it gives me something to look forward to.
ah! Vous parlez français?
Je m’y specializé as an undergraduate, majoring in a subject that did nothing but give me a 4.0 grade average. Useful, eh? 😀
Alors…au jour d’hui, que peut-on faire?
About the Ole-Lady Insomnia — i.e., the phenomenon that causes you to wake up at two or three in the freakin’ morning: Try this: GO TO BED AT SOME RIDICULOUSLY EARLY HOUR.
Videlicet: let’s say you’re in the sack by 9 p.m. By 10 p.m, you”re more or less asleep. This means that at 4 a.m., you’ve had six hours of sleep…which for an old bat is within reason. If a miracle has happened and you fell asleep fairly quickly after the 9 p.m. crash, then you had — hang onto your hat!~! — SEVEN HOURS of sleep.
At our age, that’s an incredible snooze! 😀
Seriously…think about it: If Olde Age is causing you to wake up in the wee hours, you may be able to get around that by going to sleep in the PRE-wee hours. So, let’s say you’ve been used to hitting the sack around 10 or 11 p.m., right? if Insomnia rousts you at 2 a.m., you only get four hours of sleep. But if you turn off the boob tube and actually go to sleep at around 9 p.m., then you get 5 hours of sleep.
Uhmmm…okay, that’s better than nothin’, and better than four hours’ worth. But let’s say a miracle happens and you sleep until 3 a.m. (a typical insomniac’s reveille hour), now you’ve extracted SIX hours of sleep…and that’s approaching a normal, halfway decent snooze time!
In other words (i think…): don’t try to work a decent night’s sleep by working forward from an hour that most people would go to sleep. Go the other way around: figure you’re going to wake up at an Insomniac’s Reveille hour and go to sleep EARLY enough that you’ll extract enough snooze time to keep you from being a zombie.
After Paris: next trip is to Canada, right? 😉
Seriously, it’s hard NOT to ruminate on all those shortcomings, fiascos, offenses, and whatnots in the haunting wee hours of the morning. But it’s pretty easy to make things worse by actively TRYING not to think about them! I do, though, try not to think about childhood, a peculiarly unpleasant time!
One trick you might try for the middle-of-the-night wake-up call is to actually GET UP. The logic (such as it is) behind this strategy suggests that bed should be for sleeping, and so if you can’t sleep you should get up, putter around or read a book or fix a glass of warm milk…or whatever. Then when you go back to bed, it’s easier to go back to sleep.