A SLEEPY PLEISTOCENE GRUNT

 68 of #100daychallenge

Sometimes it takes a good while to calm down enough to go to sleep. It's almost two and I could easily stay up for another couple of episodes of Startup. But I should try to follow the example of the kittes spread around and get some shut-eye. When I stay up late and get up late, it always makes for a tough day. However, after I get my temporary crown replaced, I can take a nice nap. And I finally got into the needlepoint groove, so perhaps that helped.

The next evening ...

Insomnia struck last night. I was awake at 2:30. There used to be an internal place I could go to imagine the future and fantasize a bit about how it might be groovy for me. Through a melange (or is that a mêlée?) of circumstances, some of which are my very deep deep despair about the growing militarized right wing of the USA and the unprecedented rise of utter stupidity, I just don't have access to that calmer place. So I can't sleep. And listening to books and podcasts tends to upset me more unless I can find one that is the proper balance of interest and boredom.

Mom was in a weird state today. This evening she said she was light-headed or rather that her head felt as if it were exploding. Then she said maybe her right arm felt weird, but when queried soon after, she didn't quite know what I was talking about. It might not be too far off that she needs someone with her all the time. As it is now, I don't leave her alone for more than a couple of hours, but not being able to leave her alone at all is a horse of a wholly different breed as well as color. She had a urinary accident and did not make it to the bathroom for the first time (I think it was the second). She's been leaking in the morning on the way to the bathroom, necessitating my monitoring the floors more carefully. 

Her arthritis is so bad that tonight she said she understands why people kill themselves. I could up her pain medication particularly at night, but given her other brain weirdness, I did not want to mess with overdosing her. 

I have to wrap my head around what this means for me. More care, less independence, less free time. 

So, not much else went on today. I managed to teach yoga even though I was pretty tired from the insomnia. We were late, but still got through it okay. I got my temporary crown replaced again. It will be a week before the permanent one is here. I took another long time-and-space-relocation nap from which it took me a few hours to wake up. I am still kind of in that post-nap sleepiness, but that is fine as it is time to go to bed. I think I will sleep okay. 

WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

I think I remember this moorland,

    The tower on the tip of the tor;

I feel in the distance another existence; 

    I think I have been here before.

And I think you were sitting beside me

    In a fold in the face of the fell;

For Time at is work’ll go round in a circle,

    And what is befalling, befell.

“I have been here before!” I asserted,

    In a nook on a neck of the Nile.

I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,

    And you smiled. I remember your smile.

I had the same sense of persistence

    On the site of the seat of the Sioux;

I heard in the tepee the sound of a sleepy

     Pleistocene grunt. It was you.

The past made a promise, before it

    Began to begin to begone.

This limited gamut bring you again. Damn it,

    How long has this got to go on.

— Morris Bishop, The New Yorker Book of Poems, Viking Press, New York, 1969