Yesterday was Friday. Before it happened, I finally got the perfect night’s sleep again. That’s roughly eight hours between roughly nine at night and five in the morning.

Then I worked steady and hard all day, and went to bed again at 9 PM again, tossing down a little magnesium to make sure I stayed on track. Couldn’a been better or more virtuous or more promoting of all that is healthful and right.

But after three hours I woke up anyway. It’s a little after 1 AM on Saturday. I’m at the keyboard when I’m Supposed To Be Sleeping.

The temptation is to feel frustrated, and honestly I am, but honestly just a little.

I might blame getting old some.

I might blame myself, for not perfectly observing the ‘no eating in a three hour window before bedtime’ rule.

But …

I also realize that the main reason to blame at all, or to feel frustrated, is Habit.

“I’m going to be a mess at work tomorrow”. The chant of the wage slave.

But I’m not a wage slave anymore. so it’s not really and truly that big of a deal, unless I let it be–Habitually.

Instead I get up, with a minimum of fluster.

I turn to tell you this story, and brew a pot of perfect peruvian decaf, and remain alert to signs that my body and brain will be willing to take a nap, say between four and seven in the near future.

Keeping on schedule more or less.

Or … not.

Maybe I’ll stay up again until 20 hours from now, groggy toward the end of it, and nail the ideal bedtime yet again for another try.

Maybe the theoretical nap will be later, and shorter.

***

At some point in the three hours, I dreamed of fighting my father again, only this time I did not beat him to literal death as I did in the last such dream.

I just parried him to a draw.

Awake now, I am considering that maybe he, and other dead people like him, are my only real and true audience after ten years of this practice.

Or, in parallel, that I myself am a gaistijaną.

***

Then when I was waking I was thinking about major appliances.

Throughout most of civilized history, Owning A Dishwasher meant owning a person (or at the very least paying them wages to dishwash, which is pretty close to the same thing in terms of economic theory).

Nowadays a ‘dishwasher’ is an expensive appliance, though that doesn’t stop the most morally lost of us from hiring people to load, run, and unload our dishwashing machines.

I don’t own either kind and I don’t want to; I wouldn’t even if I too was loaded.

In some weird anarch-ronistic way, I want and need to wash my own dishes, regardless of how much money I have or will ever have.

***

Sinks, therefore, are the most important and essential of the modern appliances.

Alongside a water heater. Hardly any practical way of getting around it.

Followed closely by the other big food ones, the fridge and the stove. (In some idealized world, a garden and a pasture and [let’s face it] an abattoir.

Then out past doing your own food, there’s the furnace, a convenient way to avoid freezing to death. (AC, on top of the HV, if you live somewhere you shouldn’t.)

And a tub, and/or shower, kind of an almost-essential.

Way down the list there are optional conveniences: washer, dryer, toilet, and so on to the minor appliances: “coffee maker” (please don’t fucking keurig ever), grinder, roaster … uh, “Ninja Foodie”.

However long or short your own list of Necessaries is here, there’s a tremendous amount of work involved in maintaining them and using them, every day of allegedly civilized life, yours and mine both, in varying degrees.

There’s a lot more to say about it all.

But I’m not saying it right now; in part because Who Do You Thinks Gonna Care?

and I have other fish to fry