About the night of 3/4-5, last night, different from all other nights in my experience, in its schedule and in the content of my dreams, suggesting that I spent the night in the grip of feel-good hormones rather than stress hormones. And awoke in calm delight.
First, some background, about earlier nights. Then about the schedule of last night’s sleep; about the content of last night’s dreams; and an appended note about feel-good hormones and stress hormones.
A journal of the nights of 3/1-2, 3/2-3, and (last night!) 3/3-4, during which I experienced the deepest lows and the greatest highs of hormone-driven states of being.
Meanwhile, somehow, the rest of life went on: washing up, getting my meals, ordering groceries and household supplies, mourning the deaths of old friends and admirable people, seeing doctors, getting exercise, scheduling appointments, writing blog postings, singing, fretting (pointlessly) about being completely uprooted and moved to an assisted living facility, getting income tax materials together, keeping in touch with friends (especially those in crisis or grieving, but just to renew connections going back as far as the 1940s), trying to recollect my work and activities in the 1960s (as intellectual history now potentially of significance), fending off assaults on me as an icon of DEI, answering e-mail, all while trying somehow to cope with the state of the world, which seems threatening to degrees once unimaginable, and in the face of grievous memory losses that will take months of labor to recover from (at the moment I am damaged goods, with a somewhat fried brain).
The three nights, expanding on notes I made at the time. (My memory for new things is very unsteady, so that I write stuff down. Then I have a huge pile of notes in which I have to find whatever it is that I need. So I have to try to remember where the relevant notes are. It’s all vexing, leading me to weep in frustration. But I persevere.) (more…)
(Firmly located in men’s crotches and inclined to silliness, though without the bodyparts illustrated and without the street talk — so clearly not to everyone’s taste)
From WOIO tv channel 19 in Shaker Heights OH (serving the Cleveland area as a CBS affiliate — covering news, weather, sports, and a ton of racy / raunchy content): a report on a guy whose impressive genital package turned out to be a huge stash of narcotics, inspiring me to some musical silliness on Facebook.
My signal accomplishment for this day was an hour of singing Sacred Harp hymns along with the wonderful YouTube videos of All-Ireland Sacred Harp conventions of years past. Eventually, I’ll celebrate just one song, SH276 Bridgewater, which is such a favorite that it has on occasion triggered my slipping into a state of ecstasy.
(Well, all about penises and what men think about their own and other guys’, so edgy for many people — but mostly clinical in content and tone, not at all raunchy)
Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine strip of 2/24, about what we might call little-dick grandiosity — the common belief that megalomania is (in general) a compensation for having a small penis:
There is in fact no evidence for this idea; and we might legitimately question whether there are any actual cases of little-dick grandiosity, as I put it so crudely above, at all
A note from my recent stay in Stanford Hospital: into the emergency room on Friday 1/30 in the afternoon, returning home late in the afternoon on Thursday 2/5. Not about the afflictions that brought me there, but about an odd experience during the long time waiting on a gurney in a very small room in the emergency department while tests were made and a hospital room sought. I had company all through the day: my daughter Elizabeth and grandchild Opal, who patiently enjoyed a card game together and played some interesting music softly for me.
Hallucination: the curtain. This tiny room had a curtain that could be drawn to make it private from the hallway outside: a pleasant beige color with somewhat glossy horizontal strips of a slightly darker tint.
But for me it was, startlingly, much more than that: what I saw inside those strips was the (unfortunately illegible) text of a substantial article that I was writing to post on this blog. I was entirely aware that this material was a hallucination, visible to me but not to Elizabeth or Opal, though I described it for them. Fascinating, in no way disturbing. But I was unable to dismiss or erase the text from my visual field — it persisted for more than an hour, with no way for me to un-see it. And then I was moved to a different room, with a different kind of curtain, so no more hallucination.
This sort of cognizant hallucination — my ad hoc label for hallucination (in this case, visual) with full awareness on the part of the experiencer — is, apparently, not unusual, though not much seems to be known about the triggers for it. They are common in the moments when people are dropping off to sleep and, especially, when they are wakening.
The Pearls Before Swine strip by Stephan Pastis, for 1/9/26:
A difference between British English and American English over constructions with the definite article (arthrous) or without it (anarthrous) — putting aside British Bob’s touching belief in the primacy of BrE over AmE
(There is a Page on this blog with links to postings on Language Log and this blog on arthrousness)
Now for some scholarly observations on BrE vs. AmE practices in arthrousness with various prepositional objects, among them hospital and university. Here I take you to Lynne Murphy’s blog “Separated by a Common Language: Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the US” — in her posting “(the) menopause, (the) flu, (the) hospital” from 4/17/2007:
A note about a moving diary of unsparing self-reflection by the American writer Calvin Tomkins as he struggles through the year to the age of 100: in print in the New Yorker issue of 12/22/25: “Centenarian: A diary of a hundredth year”.
Tomkins (born 12/17/1925, graduated from Princeton in 1948; I am 9/6/1940 and Princeton 1962 — merely stumbling through towards the age of 86, but we swim similarly against the chill tides of decline and loss) has been a writer for the magazine since 1958. Casuals, interview pieces, and so on, but preeminently as the magazine’s art critic.
His piece is characteristically direct and spare, traversing a wrenching jagged route through his life, without drama or pleading. His story obviously speaks to my condition, but more generally serves as a model of how to deal with nasty, messy mortality with grace and humanity. And, if you can bear it, should be read along with Tatiana Schlossberg’s remarkable “A Battle with my Blood”, in print in the 12/8/25 issue of the New Yorker under the head “A Further Shore”, about her last days as a 34-year-old woman dying of leukemia.
The sinus-infection background, from yesterday’s posting “Chair-ridden”:
The [long-running, like for weeks] sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting junk I cough up constantly, and is, alas, not much affected by nasal saline sprays. Mostly, it’s unbelievably tiring. Hence, my being chair-ridden (the analogue of bed-ridden).
Now I’m going to amble discursively through the rest of this story. Walk with me.
I’ve been sick for some time — a terrible sinus infection that makes sleeping lying down mostly impossible, so I’ve been sleeping, immense amounts of time, sitting up in the comfy chair in my living room — sleeping fitfully, with unpleasant waking moments, for long times (9 to 11 hours) at night and then with desperately needed hour-long naps during the day. (I also have attacks of the itchies — once mostly in my crotch, which was dreadful — and crippling arthritis clawing up my right hand, but those are side issues.)
The sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting junk I cough up constantly, and is, alas, not much affected by nasal saline sprays. Mostly, it’s unbelievably tiring. Hence, my being chair-ridden (the analogue of bed-ridden). I still need to order in food and do some basic household work, and until today have been able to produce at least some small posting each day, to show that I’m not dead yet.
