Over the course of the last week or ten days, I’ve been plagued by a curious insomnia. In the wee hours I get tired, and do all the things–wind down, take a novel to bed and read awhile, find my eyes drooping, turn out the light, and drift off. But sleep doesn’t come. I open the book again, or just give up and get up. One time I didn’t crash again until eleven in the morning, but even if I can do it earlier, I end up waking in the afternoon, and the day feels mostly shot already.

This phenomenon is a variation on a familiar theme. When I was young I’d often stay up late, but late meant two or three, and when I crashed I was Gone, Gone, for eight or ten or twelve hours forward schedule permitting.

The past three or four years an agitated and anxious sleeplessness has been very common, but the cause was obvious and often painfully so. The shitmonkeys who drove me out of this town in the first place got deep in my head when they did so (admitting this is no picnic), and I would let myself be tortured by reliving the feelings involved as night fell. Sometimes the anxiety was related more to the subsequent jobs and their unpleasantness, but it was always about being driven out of professorial Eden and not finding it again.

When I left this house I had a pivotal moment, one where I renounced even being a prof any more, but rather just a guy who stood in his driveway professionally naked, facing the future without the blanket of the title, the status, the money that came with it all in the second decade of the millennium. The middleclass zenith. But of course this renunciation was purely theoretical–I fell back on making my living the same basic way–but it was hollow and unfulfilling and might have just made things worse. Certainly this was so internally.

Down south this May I was forced out again, but I saw it coming from a mile off, and besides that I welcomed it. I was planning to bail anyway. There was some fear and loathing, and again it had a specific face, a Dean this time instead of a Chair, and my sleep did suffer a little. But things worked out pretty good on the whole, and since I was straight up legitimately Unemployed at just the time expanded benefits were falling like manna from heaven, it was actually a good thing overall, and didn’t trouble me near as much.

I set to, to the very hard work of shifting the piles of material garbage north to the once and future home, and the physical and mental exertion also did me good on balance. I’ve been healed by the sky instead of the mountain as I said, and once more I look forward to the future rather than living in dread of it.

In the wake of all that and nevertheless, sleep is broken again, more mysteriously and in a different way … here in a very contingent paradise …