Ho hum

Yeah, I don't know. I'm angst-filled now? Maybe? I don't know. I'm usually strongly against writing something unless have something to say. I don't have much to say right now. But I feel like writing. I feel like writing a lot.

Here's a thing: I'm going to the doctor tomorrow. I can't sleep. I can't remember the last time I got a good night of sleep. I think I described my perfect night of sleep quite a number of blog entries ago. That might have been the last time. This is my sleep pattern: Light goes off. I toss and turn for awhile. I lapse into some light sleep. I wake up a little later and stay awake for a long time. Usually, I drift back into a little sleep about an hour before my alarm goes off. This is how it is every single night. I'm usually always exhausted during the day. I really hate it. What keeps me awake...for the last several years, I've had this deep pain in my right hip that comes and goes. Hard to say what triggered it. It used to be that it would come around every so often, but not too much. The last couple of months it has been every night. It's been so severe that I can't go to sleep. I don't know what it is. Hip pain. Like the gears are really grinding in there. Hopefully I need a mechanical hip replacement with wolverine claws so when I get pissed off, claws shoot out of the side of my jeans. Probably that won't happen though. The other thing, and for some reason this makes me feel stupid to say, but I think I have RLS...that Restless Leg Syndrome thing. I was reading about it, and it turns out it's actually a kind of sleep disorder. Anyway, that happens every night too. So much so that I can't go to sleep, and if I do somehow manage to drift off, it wakes me up. It might as well be the manifestation of a demon. It's that torturous. Which feels unbelievably petty to say, because jillions of people can't sleep at night because of real torture or because of real terrible diseases. So, blah blah. But I'm going to see a doctor about that stuff tomorrow.

Hey, the Cubs suck. That sucks. I still love them. But I'm mad at them. Yo, Cubs. Stop blowing games. They beat the Braves tonight, but that feels like a drop in the bucket.

I've been reading the short stories of TC Boyle. He's okay. In the collection I'm reading now, called "Tooth and Claw", he deals a lot with "gritty" issues. Things like addiction, broken relationships, things like that. Problem is, he makes those things sound pretty false because the language he uses is way too academic. A lot of fifty dollar words that seem inappropriately placed. I don't believe your characters, TC. But, he has one story in there called "Here Comes" which is a very authentic treatment of the spiral of alcoholism and first-time homelessness. I enjoyed it because it could be the story of many of the men and women at Breakthrough or Andre House. Then, for class, I read this story called "The Woman and the Blue Sky" by Ma Jian, who is a Chinese writer. Wow. This one peeled the lids off my eyes. I highly recommend it, but it's not for the squeamish. It has to do with a modern Chinese man essentially worming his way into rural Tibetan culture so he can witness a sky burial. He uncovers some gruesome truths about this particular Tibetan village he visits and does see a sky burial. A sky burial, but the way...this is where friends and relatives of the dead person take the corpse to a mountainside, cut it into pieces and feed the pieces to the vultures and crows. Buried in the sky. A very stark story indeed.

Alright, I have to get my laundry now. And continue to experience ennui.