Sleep last night evoked memories of a train ride from Tampa to NYC, early 1990s. I saw next to an overweight woman who referred to herself as “fat,” which at the time I did not take as a queue for me to use that word. But I feel safe using it now, ~30 years later, with no chance of retroactively offending her should her sensitivities about that word have changed.

It was not that I imagined her in bed with me. Although that’s not too far a stretch considering how many hours we spent next to each other just trying to sleep. I joked that you’d need about 12 hours to get 5 or 6 hours of sleep, an estimate she found far too ambitious. She estimated 18 hours of trying to sleep on a ratchety, noisy, bumpy-as-hell Amtrak train might possibly get you 4 hours of sleep spread across all those 18 hours.

I felt like I was on a train last night. Sore throat returned, I was in bed before sundown, so probably around 6pm. I wanted to sleeeeeeeep. Woke at 9:15pm, again at 11pm, again at 1:10am. The last one was the hardest to get back to sleep after. I was thrashing punches into the air, rolling over and over in search of a prefect position, one in which I do not breathe on myself because I hate that so much, when I myself or a partner breathes on me in bed. I tried everything to calm myself. I tried to summon music from the Vornado fan but none emerged. Resting my arm on my head in a certain way transformed the sound of that fan into something more chain-like. But I had to readjust to see if that was actually the sound of rain coming down. It was not. 

On nights like this brief memories fly through of restlessness leading to hard, pounding sex. One woman would give me a true look of respect and even amazement when it seemed to her I might never stop. Another would be mostly unimpressed. Another would be awkward and confused because of childhood sexual trauma that scars her to this day. Others were like machines.

Wesnesday’s trip to FLoral Park via Jamaica and Queens Village seems to have wiped me out more than I would have anticipated. Even with the long bus rides I got in over 12,000 steps. Yesterday, Thursday, I got in nearly 14,000 steps on a day I had not even intended to leave Tom’s apartment. I passed the stripper’s house yet again, as part of my ceaseless ritual to remind her that she cut a decent man loose when she could no longer keep track of  the lies she came up with to make our relationship seem possible. A woman with a lot of lies to keep track of, that she is.

Since retirning the old web server and moving on to this one I’ve had a few weirdnesses, most annoying involving SSL Certs. Nothing is wrong with the certs, I finally concluded, having never thought the certswere the problem. It became a matter of a virtual domain I misconfigured and that confused the system every which way into choking on the wrong SSL cert any time Apache rebooted. I have fixed that problem. I next face the challenge of getting the streaming webcam running 24/7 without use of OBS or the WIndows 11 mini PC I got intending to use it solely for a Plex Server.

I am at the workplace, successfully early, because my fear of getting fired from this job for being 1 second late has never left me since day 1. I just spent 3 consecutive days off, which was a relief after 3 years of the shit splift, where I took Wednesday and Sundays off. It was a very awkward schedule which messed up my personal life by making dating or spending time with someone seem just about impossible without living together, and that scenario was nowhere on the horizon.

OK, let us see how a night of questionable sleep prepared me for the 10-hour workday. Friday is my Monday.