Category Archives: Paul

That feeling when all you want to do is get some sleep, a lot of sleep, get caught up on sleep without being woken up by stress dreams or fever dreams or a full bladder or leg cramps (most of all by leg cramps!) and when you wake up you want it to all be better so that tomorrow (as being defined as “what happens when I wake up”) is missing all of the really shitty things from today but keeps all of the really good ones.

Not sure you can get there from here.

The only way out is through. Sleep deprived or not.

That feeling when it seems you’ve been beaten heavily about the head and shoulders for weeks and except for being in ICU or prison or the morgue it’s not clear what else can go wrong or add more stress and you’re about to give in and go with “barely good enough” because it’s all that’s available and even that’s iffy but it’s all you’ve got left and “Plan D” is a HUGE freakin’ leap that’s sort of a last resort but at least you have that option when all of a sudden with no warning there’s an opportunity that’s like a bolt of lightning and while you really don’t dare to hope because you’ve gotten your spirits crushed repeatedly you want to hope and you need to hope and when things actually fall into place and this huge weight is being lifted you’re horrified to find that almost all you can think of is a nightmare “what if” scenario where all of this good stuff is just a trap that will temporarily put you on a pedestal so that the upcoming fall will be that much harder and you want to tell your brain to STFU but you can’t quite get past that as fast as things got better for no damn good reason other than blind luck they can get horrible again just as fast.

“Adulting” is sucking it up and going ahead full speed with the good things, despite knowing that those bad things might still be lurking.

Did you see “Arrival” a couple years ago? The big reveal at the end left me a weeping puddle. This is why.

We go on, despite our fears. Maybe some day we’ll even be able to let go of some of the fear.

That feeling when it’s dark but not too late yet and you’ve been busting your ass all weekend and you’re really tired and sweaty and from a couple of blocks away you can hear some music and you’re thinking about how different sounds and frequencies carry better than others because what you hear clear as a bell (if faintly) is a trumpet line from some music and you’re thinking that must be why trumpets were used in battle and so on, because the sound carries further, and you’re thinking it must be a quinceañera or something with a mariachi band when suddenly all of the pieces snap into place and you realize it’s the background trumpet music from the choruses of The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to listen to mariachi music the same way again.

That feeling when you hurt in places you didn’t know you had places after four days of intense physical exertion in a big push to get stuff moved out of the house prior to escrow closing, either to storage or to the trash or to someplace where it can be donated, and everything is hurt and bruised and you just want to hold very still but the gods have a wicked sense of humor so all of that dust you’ve been sucking into your lungs throughout this ordeal now has you sneezing and when you sneeze you involuntarily clench every muscle in your body and every muscle in your body screams out in agony and then you have to sneeze again and you’ve become something like a badly designed toy that does nothing but hurt itself and it would be really funny if it were happening to someone else but it’s not and excuse me I have to go start sneezing again…

Ouch!

OUCH!!

OUCH!!! DAMN IT!!!