At the NYPL Business Library, coming down from a simultaneous pair of mental highs. Caffeine and post-therapist exhilaration. Listening to piano music of Christian Sinding on the Spotify. Lounging in one of these crazy decadent Aeron chairs, which i happened to see listed for sale yesterday for about $700, same as when I had one at corporate. For $700 you get prompt and no-questions-asked repair service from an Aeron technician, and you will need that because these chairs crap out constantly. Or mine did, at least.

Now listening to Sinding’s Third Symphony. It’s busy. Reminds me of Respighi.

Therapist and I spoke of stuff today, as we always do. I need to find focus. Something to do which suits me, which is of me. I should find a talent agent or manager or something such as that, someone who can evaluate everything I have and tell me what will click with the wider world. I thought about teaching piano again, to adults or teenagers. That would work, I think. I like talking about piano music and piano playing, that is for certain, though I know of and for years have known of no one who shares that interest to the degree that I would want to explore.

Sinding actually sounded like Wagner for a second there, like the opening of “Rheingold”. Now he sounds like Sibelius, that lumbering buildup to the end of the first movement of his First Symphony.

I walked here today. Roughly two hours direct from AsLIC. Maybe now I will sleep tonight. i have not slept for shit in days. I tried an anxiety pill last night but it was no good. Remembering now how I took to sleeping pills before turning to booze. I was taking 2 pills a night, waking up 5 or 6 hours later, then taking another pill. This was Sominex type stuff in college but later I would get prescription Ambien and the same shit happened. That stuff put me out but not for long enough, and waking felt as if the sleeping experience had been a foreign travel ordeal. An unnatural clobbering of brain scatter. Was telling the shrink how I never slept in high school. Obviously I did or I would be dead but from Monday to Friday I remember long hours awake, lying in bed, listening to the trains whistling in the distance. I once noticed a train came at 9:42 three nights in a row, right on the dot. I remember thinking this would give me frame of reference, something to ease my mind, something to remind me that the world turns at its own pace and I should find a wave on which to ride its ocean of perpetuity.

The 9:42 ne’er whistled again. Trains came and went but never at 9:42. Not on the dot.

The dot remains.