A friend came over to watch a movie. As he has recently quit smoking (again) he brought with him packages of two-bite cupcakes and butter tarts. So we had a chat, ate manageably sized sugary snacks, and I put in a DVD.

Then my friend looked over at me and was all “Are you sleeping?”

And I was, like, “No.”

And he went, “You are totally sleeping!”

And so he left. But he left the cupcakes.

Bastard.

Restless in my skin and unmotivated to move. It’s a bit like I’m hangover; but I’m not. This may have more to do with the time change and the weather than my mental state: grey pall drawn down over the city streets, sun suddenly banished to a different hour of the clock. There’s so little day left, now. It’s harder to feel invigorated.

I also got my arm stuck with that bloody H1N1 pin last Saturday, and the vaccine knocked me flat out for a couple of days. No flu-like symptoms, just some vision-swimming light-headed exhaustion. It might be some of that still—a weakened immune system jacking up its forces to develop antibodies against a possible threat.

Any way you slice it, I’m not at my best. I missed my Halloween plans by sleeping through them.

But speaking of which, I’m sleeping better! Psychiatrist has given me yet another pill, this one to be used in conjunction with my newly adored ziprasidone. This one makes me sleep for extended period of time to wake up refreshed rather than jacked or spacey. So far so good.

I never would have imagined taking this many pills on a daily basis even just one year ago. Now I have a cupboard full of them. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own life.

Sleep is a bitter, fickle mistress: first she visits too much, then she comes too little. After all this time, she is still—ultimately—irregular. It’s amazing I put up with her at all. What I wouldn’t give for a proper bedtime and a stable stretch of slumber.

Besides that, things seem quite reasonable. Not too high, not too low; in fact, I’m plodding along at a respectable pace. If it weren’t for the two root canals I’ve had in the past week, my life would be rigidly boring; somehow instead it’s almost stable. It’s what I imagine normal people live like, day to day. How very, very odd.

Things on the agenda for the next few days:

• Write.
• Read.
• Plan next week’s class.
• Carve a Jack-o-lantern.
• Enjoy Halloween by watching scary movies and eating smoked-paprika-spiced popcorn.

That’s all.

You can tell because of the glasses.

[Via Bill In Exile.]

After a lively discussion surrounding the issue of disclosing one’s positive status to friends, family and possible sexual partners, the group was drawing to its close. Our leader spoke following a pregnant pause; we had been ruminating in silence over the last shared sentiment.

“But we all have our demons, don’t we?”

Rhetorical or not, a very clear image sprang to my mind in response: each of us standing behind a little round table,  with a large handkerchief draped over an irregular object. Then, with a flourish, everyone removing the fabric. “Voilà! Our demons!” Exposed, the vile little creatures, rendered in cartoon monstrosity, capered back and forth on the wooden surfaces with grasping little claws, mewing fangs, and rolling, red-pebble eyes.

“Why does yours have a lawnmower?”

I laughed, of course.

On the subject of a willful child ignoring the death-bed wishes of his father.

“He was doing so well, holding back the madness; now it’s like he’s not even trying.”

“He is trying! Just the other day he tied to use laser pointers as support beams for his new shed. You can’t tell me God wouldn’t have attempted that if he’d thought of it.”

“Poor thing, lying under that pile of corrugated metal.”

“I know. He looked genuinely surprised.”

I sometimes worry that I come off as pretentious; and then I read a sentence like this:

If, as lesbian-linguistic theorists posit, language and literature create, decreate, and recreate corporeal and cerebral manifestations of self / other in terms of both a material and intellectual body (of work), then it almost goes without saying Montréal’s Nicole Brossard (b. 1943) leads the way in her endless quest to first dislocate then relocate the act of writing in the feminine to inscribe or imprint phonemes, words, sentences, paragraphs and texts entire — not to mention the spaces between / around same — which yield to transgressions, transformations and, ultimately, transcendences of what one generally considers patriarchal truths undermining the universal jouissance of imaginative existence in narrative perspective (or perception) of the core self intransigently as fluid as it is fixed.

At which point I stop fretting.

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(You can read the entire text that I lifted those 121 words from here, should you feel so inclined.)