Well that was a sleepless night. I was up at 9:30 yesterday, 1:30 PM today, and for a host of reasons. First of all I took that Unisom, after getting through the first night in memory without any booze or any kind of pill. I was starting to descend into sleep when a monster crashing noise came from somewhere. I don’t know where, probably from the millennial upstairs. But I got up anyway to see if the open window in my bathroom had invited a strong wind that knocked a bunch of shit over. But nothing like that. That all happened just as I was descending into real sleep. So it took another hour to get back to that point of descending into sleep. At which time I heard some kind of beeping noise.

I went through my mind of what it could be, since all my devices were turned off. The phone was too far away for me to hear any kind of sound coming from it, even with the volume turned up, which I don’t think I did. Computer speakers were all turned off. I remembered something I read about bee-sized drones that the CIA used to infiltrate Al Qaeda, and I assumed that that was what was happening here. Little beeping drones were coming in to perform surveillance on me in my sleep. I was fine with that.

So I went back to sleep. I don’t know how many hours later but I was woken again by that beeping. This time it was more harsh and insistent. And I realized, once again, that that fucking CO2 alarm, when its battery starts to go dead, starts beeping to warn you. Every single time this has happened here it decides to start beeping at three or four in the morning. I have to deal with it first of all because I can’t sleep through it but more importantly because the beeping is so loud it could wake the neighbors. It was not so long ago that the neighbors called the owner of this building when my alarm clock accidentally went off at midnight, blasting loud music which I could not hear because I was in the shower. This resulted in the landlord threatening to call the cops on me if something like that ever happened again. As I think I said in previous postings, now I’m in the completely reversed position with that person of being offered an extremely generous offer on transferring my rent-stabilized lease from this apartment to another one in the same building, right across the hall.

But back to the CO2 alarm, I know you can hear it out in the hallway when its warning beep starts chiming but I do not know if its piercing noise goes through the floors or ceilings. Better safe than sorry, in the fog of a Unisom-induced attempt at sleep I dragged a ladder out from behind three layers of crap in my bedroom, including the historic (to me) mission style recliner chair and a Tumi travel bag which has a hilarious back story to its presence in my life.

Trying not to make any noise in doing this I managed to get the ladder out without falling on my face, but while also knocking a small quantity of I don’t even know what shit that was. I get it out into the hallway and climb up the ladder and perform the incredibly irritating motions of getting the CO2 alarm off its screws. I had to be careful not to breathe on the CO2 alarm, because human breath contains CO2, and in my experience breathing on the CO2 alarm has had the effect of causing it to blast off, and it is mother fucking loud. So I managed not to breathe on the thing, which if I had might have reeked somnular havoc on my neighbors, I got the battery out, and went back to fucking sleep.

I don’t know how long it actually took me to get back to sleep after all that, or how many hours I actually slept. But I woke up and looked at the time and just felt frustrated.