Storm Day
I woke up in the middle of the night night and listened to the rain lashing the side of the house in waves and wondered if our fence was holding up, our wooden fence that comes up six feet and is rotting at the base of the main support poles. I’d done a little work during the week to secure it, screwing extra wood into certain places to reinforce weak areas. I could hear periodic pings against the side of the house too and wondered what that was. Big drips of water maybe, swelling and then falling and hitting something hard. Could my roof have a leak? Were drips of water hitting something on the ceiling above me? Why couldn’t I go back to sleep?
My wife slept noiselessly next to me. Trash day is tomorrow, I would have to get up early and take the garbage outside in the rain before the trucks come. I wondered if the new drug I’m taking, Lexapro, which I’m using in an attempt to treat depression, is what’s keeping me up. This is week 3. I’ve ramped up from 2.5mg a day to 5 now and I have the distinct feeling that’s the reason I’m waking up once a night for at least half an hour, feeling wide awake, trying to calm myself back down enough to go back to sleep.
I thought about the solar panel project. It’ll be 25K or so to generate 10.5 or 11k — a big system. That’s a little over what I use. 25K and then my enormous electric bill essentially goes away forever. Probably worth doing. I talked to Jennie about it before bed and she said fine, let’s do it. People spend money on much, much stupider things than this.
I thought about work and how little I might be able to get away with on Friday.
I thought about Jennie’s parents, and Christmas, and the prep work that still needs to be done, and this started to stress me out and I could feel part of my brain going no no no let’s not think about this right now think about nothing instead, beautiful, beautiful nothing
It still took me a while to go back to sleep
The fence held. I got the trash out. I’m writing a journal entry and I have essentially nothing to do at work so I’ll go to the gym and exercise as hard as I can and come back and make lunch and probably take a power nap and then I’ll worry about Christmas prep.
Jennie likes and hates that I go to the gym. Likes that it keeps me in shape, hates that it means I spend less time with her on days like this, when she is home from work and would prefer to sit on the couch together and put something on TV. She doesn’t have to do any parent care today — her brother is going to the house to manage her mom and dad and talk to the woman that is being paid to spend time with them so they don’t run off and do anything stupid (the mom has dementia and the dad is 95 and doesn’t think clearly either.) So it’ll be a day of relief from that, I hope. I hope we don’t get any unexpected calls, nothing crazy. Sometimes I feel like everyone on the planet is having a grand old time but there’s me and Jennie and we’re instead trapped into service for her parents, conscripted. They will be over on Christmas day.
I finished the Karl Ove book last night. The Morning Star. Almost nothing else happened in the final 20 pages or so. One of the main characters becomes certain that he saw a ghost — a young girl, a daughter of one of his friends that recently died. He gets drunk with that friend. They talk about the nature of death. I don’t read any thoughts that I haven’t had before. Science, for all the wonders that it has revealed to mankind, has yet to say a single thing about what it is like to die or what comes after. Scientists — and priests, too, for that matter — can speculate as much as they want — they can say that there is nothing, or there is heaven and hell, or there is reincarnation — but the fact is that we know as much about what happens when you die now as we did 100,000 years ago. None of the speculation by anyone is provable. It is one of the few areas of existence that seems to be immune to the idea of “progress.” If I work on my biceps, they get bigger — if a kid studies math, they can do polynomial equations — if an engineering team works on making microchips smaller, they get smaller. But you can think about death all day every day for the next fifty years and be no closer to knowing what it’s really like. That concept extends to the book itself, too — I read an awful lot about death in this book, and I still know nothing about it other than 1) most of the time I feel it’s better to be alive than dead and 2) I don’t really fear it the way I used to when I was a kid. I can think about the idea of non-existence and it doesn’t fill me with the dread or panic that would well in my chest when I was, say, nine years old and just coming to terms with the terrible idea that I would someday die. The book didn’t help me learn anything new, didn’t change my mind about anything — I still think ghosts are, to use a word my seventy nine year old father likes, “bunk.”
Jennie and I are doing a book competition for the next year. Who can read 30 before 2024? I have two done already. The Morning Star and Heart Shaped Box. She finished a rom-com book last night called Attached or something. So far the books I’m reading are a lot longer. I would complain that this isn’t fair but I was so happy to see her reading anything at all last night that I held my tongue.