Enforced Humility; Or, Losing a Day

For those who are both aware of my history and the 1945 Ray Milland movie 'The Lost Weekend,' let me calm your fears: no, I did not go off on a drunk. I didn't even have a drink.
However, in the day in which I wrote 'Glad To Be Crippled,' my body decided to make me EXCEPTIONALLY glad. Exuberant, even. In other words, my lower back and my upper back conspired together, and said, "Let's see if we can't kill this silly person!"

Well, they didn't make it. They DID make me check to see if my Butrans patch was still attached (it was), and they DID make me take the break-through medicine I've been prescribed. That's okay; that's what it's there for.
Except, I'm allergic to it. So, I itched like crazy. A couple of months ago, I itched so badly in my sleep that I scratched a wound in my arm where my patch lived. Had to take antibiotics to prevent a staph infection.
But the docs at the Pain clinic were aware that this could be a problem, so they prescribed me hydroxyzine for itching. And that would have been great, except that my insurance company abruptly decided not to pay for it. So I am in the process of seeing if there are alternatives. So in the interim, I am left with generic diphenhydramine, which was marketed as Benadryl. So that was fine.
Except that whereas it normally makes people sleepy, with me, it makes it impossible to sleep. So, all night Wednesday into Thursday, I was spinning around in the pain/itch/ exhausted/awake mode. I managed to doze a bit around 5 AM, just as my gift-from-God, happily-ever-after trophy wife Vanessa, the elegant, foxy, praying black grandmother of Woodstock, GA, was stirring about to get ready for work. So she was quiet, and didn't try to talk to me. Isn't she the sweetest thing?

With their cooperation, I managed to get Alicia Ann up at 6:30 and on the bus at 7, and Kenneth up at 8 and on the bus at 8:30 (I had the difference in the elementary and middle school schedules). Then I made two whole wheat bagels with onion cream cheese, and managed to eat all but one half before lapsing into dreamland in my chair in my man-cave.
My plan was to start by reading another of Tom Rogneby's Minivandian Tales as a warm-up, and then take up Amie Gibbon's "Psychic Undercover," but I was only a few pages into the story of how they defend against a former friend now in desperate circumstances (it's a whimsical tale, really) when my eyes slammed shut.

I woke briefly sometime after 4:45, when Kenneth came in to ask permission to do something. It's good that he's a trustworthy kid; he's not gonna ask to borrow the car or a knife. Then I went back to sleep until 8:30 PM.
Which allowed me to go upstairs, watch a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad, and then let Jack Webb lull me to sleep. If you haven't already discovered it, Internet Archive has a ton of old radio shows available to listen to, and while some of them might be too energetic to be soporific, Dragnet works just fine. The link, if you want to pursue, is here.  That's for the Old Time Radio section; they also have areas for Grateful Dead Concerts, Feature Films, and several digital libraries.

Now, people I hang out with know that I'm almost bland, in terms of politics. That's so very true today. Wasn't always the case; I voted for George McGovern by absentee ballot while in Basic Training at Ft. Jackson. That happened to be the day they taught us how to use the Claymore mine (FRONT TOWARD ENEMY). But now? I ain't looking for any solutions from politicians, and I don't plan on getting into a swivet about anything they do.

But it did occur to me that losing a day might be a good strategy to keep in mind from time to time.
Your mileage may vary.
(Ummm...that's a joke. I do not advocate sleeping through the day, and particularly not through an administration!)