Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The purpose of art is to elicit emotion, is it not?

"But while emotion is a humanly interactive experience, the vehicle of art is strictly one-way. It is the cruelest humbuggery to force unattributable sadness, anger, or love upon an observer. We inevitably are left empty, unable to return emotional feedback to an artist unaware of our specific existence."

-- Danny, in the comic strip Nukees by Darren Bleuel, 2008-12-29. (The quoted passage sets up a punch line in the net panel ...)

I saw Mom yesterday, got some grocery+utility money, saw for myself that she doesn't seem troubled by her eye surgery a few days ago, showed her how to unplug every phone in the house at once the next time she gets a Verizon operator who asks her to unplug her phones as a troubleshooting measure before scheduling a service call, ate mom-prepared food which was especially yummy -- mmmmmmm, fried halloumi in pita! and good, strong, wrinkly, bitter black olives! mmmmmmm ... such a change from my recent diet of peanut butter and cheddar -- and oddly lowered my blood sugar instead of raising it, and did three loads of laundry. Sheepie came over bearing gifts, so she and my youngest brother and I chatted until my laundry was dry. Stopped on the way home only to deposit money to make my checking account balance non-negative again and buy bread, chocolate, and cat litter; scopped the litter box and took out the trash when I got home, and revised my diagnosis of the toilet problem (not the flapper valve as I'd thought; rather, it's running because of a leak from a fitting on the underside of the tank -- so I've got an old yogurt container there now to catch it, but am not sure yet how to go about solving it), and tried to go to bed.

Well into daylight, after many, many rounds of nearly falling asleep and getting jerked back awake, I really, really wanted sleep. Unwilling to take two doses of Klonopin in the same month (I don't know how often I can take it w/o the psych effects showing up, and really don't want to find out), I tried three Unisom capsules (which comes to 150mg Benadryl[1]), 40cc ethanol (contained in 100cc whisky), and an antihistamine that actually works as an antihistamine for me. Took a damned long time, but it did put me to sleep. I'd entertained some hope of sleeping eight hours and then going to 3LF rehearsal, and set an alarm for that purpose, but instead slept until 22:30, at which point I woke up from a dream in which I was explaining the path I took to my religious faith to two high-schostudents (one a Catholic, the other Lutheran), feeling actually well-rested for a change but in a shitload of pain all over my body (let's see, I've missed how many doses in a row of my pain meds at this point?) and a little dizzy.

The good: I slept, enough to cancel some portion of my sleep-debt and really feel like I've slept. Yay!

The bad: I slept clear through not only the time I should have been getting ready for 3LF, but the entire rehearsal and then some, and now my sleep pattern for the day is nigh π radians out of phase with the day/night cycle for my spot on the planet. And I'm not going to pull a similar chemical stunt just to realign; I'm saving the risky drug combinations for when I've been awake so long that it's making me crazy with desparation to sleep.

The trivial: I hope there wasn't anything on television that I wanted to record...

I really need to get some sort of health coverage that includes stuff like sleep specialists and pain clinics. (And in an ideal world, gender stuff.) Alas, my being able to afford such in the forseeable future is extremely unlikely (slightly less likely than it would be if I bought lottery tickets, but ...), and I can't see Obama and Congress having the collective balls piss off the health-insurance parasites by replacing them and forcing them to go into some other business. It might, maybe, be possible to talk Obama into it if enough of us peons raise a fuss, but he won't try unless there's a chance of having it pass the legislature, and talking enough of them into something like they have in Ontario seems only the slightest bit more likely than my getting a windfall that allows me to pay for care/insurance under the current so-called system.

In the meantime, it feels kind of wierd to feel simultaneously so crappy from pain and so well from being rested and alert. Let's see whether I can get the pain level down a notch, then get back to the two projects I need to make real progress on.

[1] The first time I tried Benadryl, I felt it start working as an antihistamine a while after I took it, and fifteen minutes after that it stopped working. Fifteen minutes relief from a "12 hour" pill didn't seem useful. The next time I took it, no noticeable effect at all. Neither did it make me drowsy. But having come into a supply of the stuff recently by chance, I thought this morning that maybe even though it doesn't make me drowsy on its own, it might amplify the soporific aspects of alcohol[2]. Which it apparently did.

[2] I did try drinking myself to sleep once. It took forever, involved a not-inexpensive quantity of inexpensive whisky, and I was still drunk when I woke up, making it a worthless solution if my goal is to use sleep to go from addled-by-lack-of-sleep to clearheaded-and-awake ... and I personally don't even like the sensation of being drunk. So ethanol alone takes too long, takes too much, and has unacceptable side effects ... but does have some soporific qualities that may be leveraged, as long as whatever combination I concoct doesn't result in respiratory failure.