Tired

Oh look, it's Friday the thirteenth! Also I see that it is just exactly one month since my last post. Hmm.

I've had a note on my desk to write this for ... gosh, it feels like at least a week. And I was meaning to write it for maybe a week before that. But I just couldn't muster the energy to bother. Something ironic in that.

First the good news: my cough is almost gone. Yes, I said a month ago that it was "getting better," but there was a long, long tail on that curve. I still had plenty of times that it would incapacitate me for minutes ... just not so many of them as before. And slowly, bit by bit, the attacks got fewer. I started attending Sangha in person again, instead of by Zoom, because I didn't need to screen out quite so many coughing fits. And by today (knock wood!)—really, for a few days now—it seems to be almost gone. Once or twice late at night, maybe, but not otherwise.

Other than that, I have been wiped out most of the month.I have kept current on my writing deadlines. (That's one blog post about professional topics under my real name per week, and one short little blurb per week also under my real name.) I have gone out to get groceries when I need them. I have met other obligations when they have come up. But not much else.

All I want to do is sleep. Coffee will postpone the sleep, but it doesn't give me any boost, or the feeling of actual energy in my limbs that makes me want to go do stuff. Only spirits give me that boost (echoes of this post, thirteen years ago!) but of course I can't spend the whole day drinking. So I get up in the morning, browse the Internet, have breakfast, take a nap, browse the Internet some more, maybe answer a couple of emails, have dinner with wine, browse the Internet with a nightcap or three, and go to bed. And my body feels sluggish except when I am asleep, like I have to drag it through the motions. No wonder I'd rather be asleep! That's the only time that I'm not fighting my body just to move it through space.

Is this what "wanting to die" feels like? I don't perceive myself to be especially sad, but just getting through the day seems to take more effort than I feel like expending. 

Is this depression? (I wrote about that here. My plan of taking some of my old SSRI's didn't last very long, though.)  

Here's another ironic bit: I wrote all the above in the present tense, but it doesn't actually reflect how I feel this morning. For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to get a little more exercise, and maybe to eat a little less often. The last couple of nights, it's turned out that I've had little or nothing to drink. I've started going to bed earlier, with the result that I sometimes sleep 9 or 10 hours at a stretch during the night. And by the most remarkable coincidence, I've started napping less, and I've felt incrementally more energy. Wow, who would ever have thought there could be a connection? (Yes, that's sarcasm.) On the other hand, I do take notice that I couldn't even muster the energy to write about this state while in the middle of it. I hope I can maintain a little momentum in the current direction.

      

My cough is getting better, 3

Once again, I am writing this to put a mark on the calendar. Once again, I hope that writing about the subject won't jinx anything. Once again, I am knocking wood.

For a while now ... maybe a couple of weeks, I'm not really sure ... it has felt like my cough has been on the whole rarer and more sporadic than it was in November and December. Of course the progress hasn't been linear; a sequence of good days could still be punctuated by a bad day. But last week I attended Sangha in person for the first time since I began feeling the tickle in my throat.

Then yesterday it seemed as if my whole head had turned liquid on the inside, and was draining out my nose. I soaked four handkerchiefs and innumerable tissues. I got nothing done all day (actually that's been a problem for a while regardless of my cough) and I went to bed at 8:30. I slept ten hours or more.

And this morning I feel ... different. I won't claim that it's all over. But I've been up for more than half an hour while logging in and typing this, and I've coughed once. A small, almost vestigial cough. Did yesterday drain all the gunk out of my head? I guess we'll see. But maybe.

As of today, it's been eleven weeks and some—not quite twelve weeks—since the day this round of coughing started. Maybe it's winding down. At any rate, I'm hopeful.

       

What was and what might have been

This post is a little different from everything that has come so far—over 1500 of them. This post is deliberately, consciously fiction. But that shouldn't be so strange. I've used this venue to make forays into poetry, philosophy, armchair psychology—even meming, for heaven's sake!—in addition to all my usual whining. Why not fiction?

"Roughly he grabbed her heaving shoulders,
pulling her down onto the bed and ...."

So to be clear, what I have linked in the pages below never really happened. It is purely fiction. More than that, it is actually pornography, or at any rate an attempt at pornography. I don't know if it really works, but that's how it should be graded. If it doesn't work, leave me a comment to let me know why, or what I need to fix.

Having said all that, the story is nonetheless based on an event that really happened. Back in the summer of 1992, Marie undertook a cross-country road trip. She stopped in for one weekend to visit Wife and me. (I mention the visit briefly in this post.) The visit was fun, but its long-term consequences poisoned my friendship with Marie for a while, because Wife told her lies about us that led Marie to offer to be my side-piece. I was already uncomfortable with Wife sleeping around, and I was pretty sure I was in favor of monogamy on principle (even though I also wanted to get into the pants of Girlfriend 1, who wanted nothing to do with me). So I was troubled and confused over the issue, and this meant that I handled Marie's offer very clumsily. She was hurt, and took my rejection very much to heart. When we finally got back together in 2016, we had a lot of damage to work through.

But recently I began to wonder, What if Wife had just told Marie the truth? And then what if, on top of that, she had been a lot more cunning and skillful at human relations in general? Could we have had a different outcome?

The story that follows is one possible answer to that question.