2026-01-30 Journal Entry

Another day, another journal entry where I say how poorly I slept etc. etc. I have gotten in the particularly nasty habit of going to bed later and later, with my current time ending up somewhere around 1:30am. I just know that fucks with my sleep cycle though, I’ve been waking up terribly sleepy and like I got no rest at all, and it makes even the relatively straightforward task of siting and typing here in the mornings feel Herculean. I’m proud of myelf for keeping the streak alive though.

What to say, what to do. I don’t know. The usual things are to do my writing, go on a walk with a Red Bull (I think I’ve mentioned a Red Bull in all of my recent posts, it’s disgusting but it’s kinda like walking around with a coffee for me at the moment, which seems sad and strange but ce la vie), and then come back and read a whole bunch, though inevitably I get sidetracked by tinkering with my blog or something like that (which took up practically my entire day yesterday redesigning the thing). I’m remaking it to be more of a dumping ground, a spew of inspiring things that I enjoy that’s essentially one big feed instead of its current life as a Pristine, Fancy place for very formal writing. The big writing can happen in the stories and in my notebooks, and the blog can be for everything else.

Har-de-har-har. Words aren’t really coming to me so much this morning. That’s the whole sleep insufficiency thing, I think, though I understand there’s a certain amount of “warming up” the brain has to do in the morning, hence these pages that go out. They’re a really clever mechanism for coaxing out words, for getting the mind to think and churn on the verbal level when perhaps it most wants to stay on the physical one (I’m hungry anad tired, fix plz).

And yet my brain isn’t really quite on the verbal plane yet. I feel like I had a dream, but I don’t remember of what.

I did have a thought as I was going to sleep last night about a story structure in which it’s a bunch of stories told simultaneously but they all fold into each other. The story of parents on their wedding day, and in another story a young woman returns home and talks to her parents who reminisce about some insane event on their wedding day that’s relevant to her; a priest finds a baby on the doorstep of the parish, etc. etc. These were the images floating in my head as I fell asleep last night, which isn’t to say that they were good or worth following but merely to say that they were there, present. It felt nice to think about, and more polyphonic structures seem interesting to me, but they’re tricky and not everything has to have somse insane structure. Saramago pulls off a lot in what is otherwise quite straight-line narratives.

Aaaahhhhhh everything in my body does not want to sit here and write. I am going to make it, if only because I am painfully aware that I will not do it at any other time of the day, something that has become obvious to me over the last few days. I have to get up and write when the going’s good or else I become fried quite quickly. I don’t know why it’s so prickly, this mind of mine, but there seems to be little room for error. Do it right or don’t do it at all.

Speaking of which, even just sitting here I feel I’m getting distacted. I’d rather sit here and read the information on getting a tax refund for something I bought here in Portugal than actually sit still and feel the brokenness of my body. Brokenness is dramatic but feels true to the felt expression of hunger and sleeplessness. I do not know why it is we sleep but I know that without it my bones feel hollow and my stomach full of petrol. Sleep deprivation is interesting and strange to experience when intentional, but in times like these I feel I would rather be dead. I am being dramatic of course but the simple fact is that sleep seems to clear the cache of the mind and without it we’re constantly using swap and being tugged around in a way that is unlivable.