Well obviously, I’m not deaf

Why yes, Buddhist monk I found on Pinterest, I DO hear the birds. And I’m sick of hearing the fucking birds (especially the Eastern Fucking Koel). I usually hear them around six in the morning when I still haven’t fallen asleep and they remind me of how long I’ve been trying and failing to sleep, whereupon I usually continue to not sleep for a while long. The birds’ sounds may or may not be pleasing to listen to otherwise (I must confess to finding something oddly reassuring about the local kookaburras when they go off, even in those wee small hours), but they don’t materially change my life as it currently stands.

And life has not really been a barrel of laughs in recent months. I went out to a club on the night of the 8th, which was pretty much the first time I’d been out of the house for two months. And I do mean “out of the house”, apart from one day where there was a power outage cos Ausgrid needed to do work on the powerlines, so, for want of anything else to do I went for a walk around the block to kill a short amount of time before it came back on; otherwise, I hadn’t gone anywhere since early June which was the last time I’d needed to go and get the pills that I keep taking to stay alive for some reason, barely even out the front door. I am increasingly the hermit I always feared becoming…

…and I have kind of become this meme. I don’t even want to do the things I want to do, and I don’t want to do many things either. There were two other clubs in the meantime that I’d paid for tickets but on the nights I piked on both of them. I just… no. And on the night of Sanctuary I had to really force myself not to do that a third time. I’m still faintly impressed that I actually succeeded.

Was it worth it, though? I don’t know. I went, was pleased to see some people, disappointed not to see others, and had what I can only describe as an episode of derealisation or something. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it’s the nearest I can find. I was sitting on the bench at the back of the Lansdowne stage where the DJs were set up (cos I’m an Old Man who needs to sit down a lot and that’s an easy place to do it), just looking out at the crowd, and I had this feeling that… I wasn’t there. Something like that, I don’t know how better to describe it. I do get a sense of depersonalisation a lot of the time, but as I understand it that’s a different thing and I don’t think that’s what it was. I really don’t know how to put it in words. Nice music, but not a great night out.

Anyway—I wound up breaking a personal record yesterday, cos on Tuesday I needed to go out again, off to see the doctor in the morning to get new prescriptions for those pills, and then proceeded to stay awake. Usually when I have to be up by a certain time, my useless brain fixates on that fact and makes it hard for me to fall asleep cos I HAVE TO BE UP, etc… but this was different this time, cos I didn’t sleep AT ALL. Usually I get a couple of hours I can function on, but this time… nothing. I woke up around 4 p.m. on Monday, went to bed about 12 hours later, up again around half past nine a.m., off to doctor, home with pills before midday, finally went to bed again around 1 a.m. having not slept at any point in between. All told I think I was awake for something like 33 hours, my previous record having been 29… in that case I’d just come back from a trip to Scotland and was trying to fend off jetlag, so I had a good reason for staying awake stupidly long. This is not a record I wish to break again.

My sleeping habits haven’t been helped exactly by the amount of construction and destruction noise we’ve been subjected to lately; the house on my right and the house out back of mine have both been demolished for rebuilding, and they have not gone quietly or gently (the vibrations have been worse than the noise). The rebuilding of either house has not yet begun, but I’m kind of dreading when it does. That’s not entirely helping me either. This, incidentally, is all on top of the other house that’s being rebuilt further down this street, to say nothing of the others that have been built around the area in recent times. Not going out much has made me realise just how much the face of this end of Matraville has changed… and also how little I remember what it used to look like. That bothers me a fair bit.

And the birds are doing fuck all to help.

Then again, nothing else does either.