Sleeping Through Insomnia

It has been a very, very long time since I have had a bout with insomnia. If fact, one of the true pleasures of my life is the adoring relationship I enjoy with sleep. Which is why last night was so strange. Around midnight I decided that the novel I am reading was not to lure me for a third straight night, its a bit too dark. So I just tucked myself under the blue flannel comforters and assumed the position. Instead of my ever faithful fall into the realm of Morpheus, I lingered in a hypnogogic limbo for over an hour. There were no entertaining fantasies or story boards dancing like sugar plums, just tedious processing of the old mundane business of life.

There really are no pressing issues emotionally or and other -ally for me right now. I just had a long night of struggle with what for me is generally pleasurable and easy. I woke perhaps half a dozen times during the night and finally fell into a deep sleep less than an hour before I needed to be up and at the world again.

I felt post-downer dull when I heard the early stirring of my friend and knew we had to be off to Berkeley to meet with the remodeling contractor. A solid half day of errands and consultations awaited us. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for her, she had had a similar night to mine, so we shared a scone and grumped our way to the other side of San Francisco Bay to put in our time in the real world.

This evening, I am going to bundle up in some heavy cotton, curl up with a good, if mindless book and grab the very first train to the land of Nod. Got no needs to do, no promises to keep.

p.s. late today I noticed an item I was reading on the web last night, a NYTimes book review on, of all things, insomnia.

The Tome Exodus Begins

Tomorrow, at last, the first truck arrives in front of the Berkeley apartment. Two trucks in fact, one for donated books (41 boxes) and one for personal papers off to the museum (16 cartons). Then on Tuesday, two more trucks; one for furniture (14 large items) and one for the antiquarian books (20 more boxes), which means --- I can schedule the carpet cleaner and potentially, if the river don't rise, I will be sleeping in Berkeley come next weekend.

There is still the matter of all of the art to be evaluated and sent off to the appropriate collector, dealer or museum, but I can share space with art and come mid-week there will be enough space in the apartment for at least one large humanoid and twelve million dust mites.

Once I am in residence I will share some of the truly interesting facets of my latest domicile, but as of today I am officially closing the final calendar month of the longer-than-expected non-domiciled period I so casually entered early last year.

The next big life decision: will I be in one place long enough to once again co-habitat with a feline. It has been three and a half years since last I shared space with a furr-ball and I surely do miss the purrs.

High Quality Pencil Sharpening

Let me just say up front that I derive no monetary benefits from your potential use of the website profiled in today's post. I am not an affiliate member, nor do I have any financial interest in said website, nor do any members of my immediate family or any recent lovers.

I am not a fan of solitaire and having recently given up online poker, so I was in need of some cyber-pastime other than my interest in english language newspapers from non-US countries. Then I discovered Sporacle.com. I apologize to any of my readers who become addicted to Sporacle but as all consuming websites go, it is more educational than most and a lot less stress on your wrist than many more pictorially oriented sites.

Sporacle describes itself as "mentally stimulating diversions." It is that and also frustrating, embarrassing and challenging. It is design to be "played" solo but while in Indiana on my recent trip, my brother and I found with a laptop each we could have Sporacle Challenges.

Basically, Sporacle is a factual, quiz, trivia, general to specific knowledge set of tests which as of now number "2,782 published games plus 60,865 user created games that have been played 199,855,339 times." Allow me to tweak your interest.

How about can you name all fifty U.S. states? Easy right? Well you get 10 minutes and yes they do give you a map.

Think you are geographically intelligent. Name the countries of the world. There are 195, you get 15 minutes and if you manage half of them, you are a star. Oh, did I mention spelling counts. Is it Herzegovina or Herzagovinia or Herzegovinia? Kasikhstan right?

You can pick from the most popular lists or go with geography, history, entertainment or sports among the fourteen categories.

Can you name the Seven Dirty Words?

How about the three most populous cities of the world by letters of the alphabet? Nope not Athens or Atlanta.

There are quizzes on corporate logos, college mascots and famous Dicks.

Some trending topics are topical, there are a lot of Olympic ones right now.

So go ahead give it a click, why not it's only time you could be spending with your family or planning your retirement or solving global warming (hint: fewer people being entertained by a power gobbling computer). Have fun.

Humbled By Hubble

I am a big fan of the Hubble Space Telescope and I visually anticipate the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now scheduled for a 2014 launch. Politics and budget deficits may have even more impact on that launch window then the already two year delay but us galaxy-gazers have cosmic faith.

The photo above of the Sombrero Galaxy was voted the best picture taken by the Hubble. You can see the top ten Hubble images here and on NASA's hubblesite. Besides providing brilliant images from far beyond our galaxy, not to mention great desktop backgrounds (I am currently using the Tarantula Nebula); the Hubble also has accumulated hard scientific data that will be under analysis for decades.

This is the Cone Nebula, which is about 2.5 light years long and growing or expanding to be more precise. If you are feeling like a new desktop image, might I suggest the 80+ options of Hubble Wallpaper. I recommend that you avoid the Omega Centauri globular cluster, I know someone who lost a manuscript on just such a desktop.

A Pain in Time

"There is no magic immunity from pain. Mostly there is just blissful ignorance." --Amy Calistri

I am a bit consumed by pain today. Partly because I moved one too many boxes of books yesterday and am now paying the somatic price. But also because of several oft delayed and disparate ruminations of the topic of pain.

Amy made the point the other day in her piece on recent events in Austin. Humans tend to think that "it" simply cannot happen to them. Whether the it be financial, familial, psychological or other. We do have some unreflected set point that points to bad events happening to others and not to us. But, of course, every thing good or bad does indeed happen to someone and one of these times around the existential track the us will be us. Pain can motivate or demotivate people to do all sorts of things that one would not ascribe to them. Which is why the neighbors always look right into the camera and say: "He was always so friendly, I can't believe he could have done what they are saying he did."

Pain is a bitch of a motivator and psychological pain with no bleeding or bruising can be the worse. Not that physical pain is not the cause of many a out of character moment, we hope others will overlook or forget. I remember being enraged watching a news program on medical marijuana some years ago and hearing some smug 30-something congresswoman say: "Well, we can talk about this for the terminally ill, but I hear people wanting us to make pot available for arthritis, that is ridiculous." Clearly the words of someone who had never experienced pain. At the time I was supplying grass to a woman who had knuckles the size of walnuts and six inches of her spine supported with steel pins, all as a result of rheumatoid arthritis. But heaven forbid, we allowed her to seek relief from her pain in some natural substance. How could such legislation be justified? What is this to be, a nation where the health and welfare of each human is considered paramount? But, of course, should relief of pain also bring happiness, relaxation or euphoria; well that would be wrong. Sorry, no 420 rant intended.

Too many politicians only come around to enlightened positions when they or someone close to them falls victim to some painful, degenerative disease. Then they become wise and profound. Remember Lee Atwater, he saw the light and changed his position but only after being diagnosed with brain cancer.

And then there are the physicians who mouth platitudes about pain management but have never experienced pain; so they prescribe tylenol when morphine is what is needed. Pain management has been the rage for over 30 years in the medical profession but I heard yet another NPR show the other day, where the same criticism was made about doctors who don't get it yet. Whack those ignorant bastards across the shins with a tire iron and see if they don't run for the oxycodone.

Take a look at this picture, which was labeled "Back Pain".

Trust me, as someone who has had back pain for five decades, this is not a depiction of someone with back pain. This is someone with a sore back. Because if you are experiencing back pain you can't get your arms around behind you to massage it away. You are lucky if you can stand up in less than five minutes and you keep a loose pair of loafers around to eliminate the impossible task of tying your shoes.

And I haven't even ventured into the realm of psychological pain, which for now will be another post for another time. Because I am going to take another pill and crawl back between two heating pads and a cat.

Time, Time, Time

One of my bestest friends on the entire planet has an incredibly terrible sense of time. She believes it will take her an hour to do what anyone else will give themselves a day to accomplish. She has practically no sense about a day having 24 hours and some of them you might want to allocate to sleep. And she still hasn't mastered the time zones, even though I explain to her that they actually don't change twice a year.

I bring up her temporal dyslexia because I am experiencing something like it myself. I know I have a finite task in front of me. I can see, smell, taste and touch what needs to be done but somehow the more I work the slower the progress. This is not a writing project where I could blame excessive editing or flights of the muse for the pace. Nope, this be a real in-the-world labor with things and items and stuff.

Some evil imp is clearly adding work from the bottom of the pile. It could be a loaves and fishes thing, perhaps some manifesting algorithm is in play. Whatever the explanation, I am not going to succumb to the inferior explanation that I just allocated less time than the task required. No there is some nefarious collision of universes here, I will accept no lesser explantion.

In the meantime, I will be late for all engagements and quickly looking around often in an attempt to spot the metaphysical gamin, gnome or gremlin which is clearly vexing my path forward. My kingdom for a 196 hour week and more mothballs.

Seasons change with the scenery;

Weaving time in a tapestry.

Won't you stop and remember me

At any convenient time?

Funny how my memory skips

Looking over manuscripts

Of unpublished rhyme.

Which Came First the Media or the Sheep?

For quite some time now I have held the opinion that the dumbing down of the news media in the United States has been solely the responsibility of the news media itself. We all know it is easier and cheaper to run a quick gossip piece that it is to fully research a segment on nuclear energy, the humanitarian crisis in Darfur or fraud in the Department of Justice. The media moguls argue that they are only covering what the public wants to see, hear and read. My answer has been: Bullshit! I for one do not believe who Tiger Woods might be screwing is on the moral equivalent of two wars, global economic meltdown or the fate of the Hubble telescope.

Last evening, however, I tuned into the Charlie Rose Show and found him leading with an interview of a senior reporter from Golf Digest. Seems Tiger made a fully scripted statement that said blah, blah, blah. Charlie Rose lead with some bullshit PR piece by an athlete who was unfaithful to his marriage. There actually is more hard news on The Daily Show than on PBS.

Let me be clear on this item. Tiger Woods is the best professional golfer in the world. I enjoy the accomplishments of athletes like Woods, Michael Jordan, Pele, Gretsky... I like that every so often someone really is heads and shoulders above everyone else. It proves, if nothing else, that socialism is wrong. But who any of these people sleep with is not news. Repeat, not news.

I am not a news junkie, at least not what passes for news on television or in the the olde print media. I get my news from the net, where I can filter it. Yet, even with rigorous tweaking of what comes to me as news, I still know who this worthless piece of flotsam is:

Did I search once too often for "romantic european capitals" or "tackily themed las vegas casinos"? No, the news media machine decided that this creature was worthy of covering, something she apparently is unable to do on her own.

So, I asked myself: Am I wrong? What does the "public" really want to see covered in the "news"? Since I get my news from the web, I thought I should consult the internet and in particular Google for my information.

As of this moment, these are the top ten Googled items on the web:

1. who's afraid of virginia wolf

2. facebook problems

3. alexander haig

4. jazimine cashmere is pregnant by what rapper

5. facebook not working

6. dragon wars

7. miss peregrym

8. facebook outage

9. crossroads tickets*

10. tiger woods

*if you are in Illinois in late June, this is worth checking out

And these are the top ten trending topics:

1. tiger woods

2. glenn beck cpac

3. woods

4. tiger

5. olympic hockey

6. facebook

7. stick it movie

8. haig

9. wii

10. tiger woods effect**

**That last one got me, so I followed the link and found among other things that during the 13 minute Tiger Woods apology speech, the New York stock exchange actually slowed as traders paused to watch.

I shall now alter my opinion on the survivability of the human race.