Ever since I stopped taking Lexapro, I’ve had chronic sleep maintenance insomnia. Nothing I’ve done over the years has helped alleviate the problem, from medications, to meditation, to CBT-I administered by a sleep psychologist. I have a veritable pharmacy of sleep meds in my closet from past attempts. A Little Backstory A few years ago, I’d heard of a new type of sleep medication that doesn’t work through the GABA system like most of the others.

I took a week off of work for my birthday, and as can probably be expected, I spent much of that playing games. Stray Being in a cat-like mood, I started with Stray. Meow It’s a relatively short 7-10 hour game where you control a cat on a quest to rejoin its friends after being separated from them. Like any cat, you can’t talk and must interact with objects using only your mouth and claws.

The man stared weary ‘cross the valley o’er all that he had wrought, what he had yet still to do, and felt a yawning despair overtake him. – Anonymous Forty-five years, eh? Malformed though I am, I somehow surpassed my expectations to reach this point, and it’s certainly been an interesting life thus far. College, marriage, a few books, and perhaps even the pinnacle of my career, and then what?

I generally try to stay out of politics, primarily because they tend to be highly charged and particularly polarizing. One of the discussion panels I watch semi-regularly did a live viewing party of Biden’s speech last night in Philadelphia. Disregarding their commentary for the moment, what I saw and heard on that stage was extremely alarming. I now believe it’s a moral imperative to vote Joe Biden out of office as expeditiously as possible.

Well, it finally happened. A caught Covid a couple weeks ago starting Monday July 25th. Despite being in Italy in early 2020, I somehow dodged the initial outbreak and then remained Covid free for the next two years. I was even beginning to believe I’d already caught it asymptomatically some time in the past and was actually immune now. Like that time I had a random two-week long dry cough in 2020.