05.21.04 - 10:59 a.m.

I didn't get much sleep last night. I didn't get much sleep at all. Usually, when I don't get enough sleep it's because I've stayed up too too late, or because I had trouble falling asleep, but for the last week - all week - I've been waking up a bit early, tossing and turning in the wee hours of the dawn-stained morning until at last I fall back into some wholesale, fulsome sleep that is deep enough to resist the clarion call of my shrieking alarm clock.

Last night was worse, though, and for no clear reason. On Monday-Wednesday, in particular, my sleep was broken by anxiety about the house. Monday, it was just generalized "holy-shit-I'm-crazy" anxiety. Tuesday and Wednesday it was irritable "what-the-fuck-is-going-on" sort of anxiety - what would I know, and when would I know it. Last night, I didn't have any of that anxiety, I just had a headful of words I wanted to say and no way to spit them out.

4:45ish a.m. and there I am, flip-flopping like a fish in the bottom of a rowboat, except, you know, I'm not gasping for air or dying or anything, though from the exasperated sighs punctuating each and every decisive move, well, you might be surprised. I don't know how long all this went on - long enough that my vigorous flopping about sent the cat running from the bed, long enough that I finally got my sweet ass out of bed and went to do something else.

Nothing productive, of course. Instead, I piddled about the apartment, and then piddled about on the computer for an hour before finally getting up, grabbing a shower, getting dressed. I was an hour early to work, but that was an hour well-spent in the brief sweet restful almost darkness, savoring the last few shreds of semi-cool air in the building.

Yes: it's hot and bloody humid today, and the whole building has no damn air conditioning. Today's the worst day of the week, in fact. The building's owner is replacing the rooftop a/c unit - I saw the new one in the parkling lot as I came in to work and asked some toothless guy if that was our new a/c compressor and he said yes - and it will take all weekend, apparently, to manage it all. And, in order to manage it at all, they had to turn off the a/c and take out the coolant and whatnot today, which is making for a wretched day. If the lights were off, and the computes, if I just had cool sweet darkness and the smooth chill surface of my desk, it might be alright. But I need the lights, and need my computer, and therefore the heat is building up like a sauna, and since it's a sauna outside, too, there's no relief in sight.

Now my sleepless night is catching up with me, too. The rest I didn't get yawns hard at the back of my throat, makes my eyes ache, rough and sandy. It sort of hangs over me, I feel half-suspended, like I have one and a half-iterations, like I've been incompletely copied and part of me is here, part is left behind somewhere.