I sometimes think about taking a couple of Advil before bed as anti-inflammatories and pain killers, but I have some PTSD about taking too much Advil from my marathon and chronic back pain days when I would regularly gulp down 1200 milligrams at a throw and feel it in my stomach and eventually my liver. After my back surgery and some pretty intense physical therapy, I stopped running long distances and got my core strong enough to support my spine, ameliorating the need for that much Advil. So the idea of getting into a routine of pain killers before bed is repugnant to me - instead, I’ll fade the small pains as I sleep and keep rolling around in a regular search for the perfect pain-free position.
I sometimes feel like I’m not sleeping well even when my smartwatch - a Garmin Fenix 8 - says that I did. The watch and the accompanying program on my iPhone have a function that measures how much deep sleep, light sleep and REM sleep I get every night. It also assigns a score for my sleep, as if this is some kind of competition I enter every night. We live in a world where everything we do or see or eat or wear gets rated, and we are trained to feel bad or disappointed when our scores are not what we want, and we are also trained to set aside our own personal assessments and trust the ratings even when they don’t feel accurate.
That’s the weird part about my sleep score - it’s telling me that I’m doing fine. Maybe it’s right, and maybe I’m being over-influenced by my brief periods of wakefulness instead of the long periods of oblivion. I just know that those truly great nights of sleep are rarer and rarer as I get older.
But last night was one of those rare nights. Why? A goblet of margarita at the dinner before the Rockets game may have made a difference. A week of not exercising at the gym may have made me less sore. A week of relaxing at the golf course with friends in another state and breathing fresh clean outdoor air (even though I did bring home a seasonal cold) may have stilled the neurotic voices in my unconscious head.
I don’t really think too much about it - I just enjoy it when it happens.
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I walked a lap at Memorial this morning with my buddy A, then we worked out at the gym, sumo squats and weighted stationary lunges and weighted step-ups and bench presses and incline presses, always cheerfully complaining about the amount of weight we are being asked to lift.
I was in good spirits - we kept a great pace on the track and I was really feeling good during the sets at the gym. I’d had a couple of Larabars before the walk, which gave me some good energy.
Afterwards, I went home for a ham sandwich before going to my mother’s house tomorrow finish fixing her kitchen drawer.
When I got there, I checked my gluing and it was solid. As I prepared to put it all back together, my mother mentioned to me that her accountant (who had agreed to handle my mother’s taxes as a favor to me and my wife) had not done a return on her Arkansas state taxes.
To say this had distressed my mother would be an understatement. She appeared to have became convinced it could not be done before the 15th and that she would be going to jail.
This is not hyperbole. At this age, my mother takes such matters very seriously and perseverates until something is done to resolve it. It’s actually kind of charming, in the same way that your kid’s disproportionate distress about something they have done that you know is not a big deal is amusing. In both instances, it is based on their inherent and admirable desire to always do the right thing.
I stopped working on the drawer and went to her computer to get the Arkansas taxes done. Two and a half hours later, they were done. She owed the great state of Arkansas $27, which would be taken from the $1000 she had sent the state in withholding for distributions from her retirement account. She will be getting a nice refund.
I took her to the post office because I wanted her to see the envelope go into the mail and dropped her off at home, the drawer repair deferred for another day.
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Dinner was a very fine Detroit-style pizza. No dessert because we still have not replenished our store of ice cream!
I have set aside the Civil War book for now to read a book I bought this weekend at a discount store - a Bob Lee Swagger book by Stephen Hunter, which I am really looking forward to reading. (I met Hunter once at a book signing and he was very nice and engaging. Book signings are actually a great opportunity to have a quality personal encounter with an artist because there are almost never more than a few dozen people at the signings. Because people don’t read books much any more. But that discussion is for another day.)
Tomorrow: more exercise, more walking, maybe a drawer repair, maybe some work on my book, and poker!
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