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…)
Out in my walker recently, getting some exercise, accompanied by my helper Isaac, showing him places in the neighborhood (with some history of those places) and opening up the landscape around us by identifying plants, giving him their names (common and taxonomic) and explaining plant families, showing him the scents of the plants, their structures, and how they are used in the neighborhood streets and gardens. From little ground-cover plants to the huge coast redwoods that tower above us. What was once just background becomes a rich, engaging tapestry, full of things to see and talk about.
Isaac has a keen eye for detail and tons of curiosity, and he brings a rich and astonishing life history to our walks: to start with, he’s Fijiian (his native language turns out to be jam-packed with interest for the linguist: its word-order type is the rare VOS, and it has a fabulously intricate suite of personal pronouns).
There’s much more to say, but on to a very specific puzzle from our walk a few days ago, which took us past a number of privacy hedges made from a plant I don’t recall ever having noticed before, but was inescapable because it was covered with bright-red spiky flowers:
The plant in question, growing as a small shrub (photo from the Cambridge University Botanical Garden website )
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.
Reprinted on Facebook recently by Jeff Bowles, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon from 11/3/1988, in which Snoopy the writer upbraids an editor — someone I think of as the powerful but irrationally unappreciative son-of-a-bitch Ed — for failing to print his stories and make him rich and famous:
Me, I share with Snoopy a history — in my case, long past — of having my articles callously rejected by Ed. I did not seek riches, though I was happy to get some royalties from my writing; the currency of academia isn’t financial but reputational: having an audience for my ideas and my creative writing.
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.
A brief note to tell you I’m still alive, but in great misery, and doing the minimum just to get through the days. I’m sleeping about 16 hours a day, in 1-hour naps, mostly sitting up in a chair. Much of the time when I’m awake, my hands are shaking so badly I can’t do much of anything, but then that passes away and for a while I can at least type in messages — great tissues of typos, which I then labor to correct. My current state is a considerable improvement from the disasters of 12/23 through 25; I was finally able to eat my Christmas dinner for lunch today, and it was a pleasure, but I’m a long way from getting back to my pre-Yuletide level of mere chronic sickness.
I will do my best to report on what’s happened and is happening, but you have to appreciate how difficult it is to endure all this while describing it and trying to make some sense of it.
The good news is that my neighborhood experienced neither overwhelming floods nor tornados.
Two cartoons from the New Yorker issue of 12/15/25: Michael Maslin with a phrasal overlap portmanteau tribute to the state of Vermont (land of covered casseroles, for covered-dish socials, and rustic covered bridges); and Roz Chast, showing us Santa’s alarmed helpers when he can’t resist falling — once again — for clickbait.
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.
