The Rebooting

It appears that the central processing unit in my brain has shut down without informing me, run a complete check on my systems, and is now slowly rebooting itself. Most of my energy has to be redirected to these processes, so I am down to basic functions.

Since the weekend of Oct. 3 I’ve been sleeping 10 or 11 hours a night, straight. I am an Olympic-level sleeper: if I don’t get my eight or nine hours of deep sleep, I spend the next day plotting to take naps. This is a different kind of sleep, though. There’s something heavy and narcotic about it, like losing consciousness for 12 hours straight after a 21-hour flight. It’s like crashing after a binge or three days without sleep, without the binge or the lack of sleep. Exhausted people must sleep like this, only I’m not exhausted. Unless I’d been leading a double or triple life I wasn’t aware of, in another time zone. If anyone’s spotted me in Warsaw or Patagonia in the last few months, let me know.

The dreams I remember having are no weirder than usual. There was a vivid one in which I was fleeing a pink plastic scorpion across a field of rocks using my leather document bag as a sled. Shortly after that I dreamed I was trying to convince my cat Mat to come to the bookstore with me before it closed.

When I’m not sleeping I’m able to do regular things: I eat, do my chores, walk around, see friends. I find that I can absorb data and record information, but I don’t have the energy to generate output. My writing feels oddly detached, as if... Ha! Must not say, “as if someone else has written it,” that would be psychotic. It’s like being on automatic pilot — the link between brain and typing fingers is engaged, but the rest of the brain is occupied elsewhere.

So I don’t feel like writing anything that requires thinking, but I have been reading like a maniac. I was reading a book a day, which freaked me out a bit so I stopped. On Monday I read Dark Water, Robert Clark’s investigation into the flood that submerged Florence, Italy in 1966. On Tuesday I read Carrie Fisher’s hilarious memoir, Wishful Drinking. On Wednesday it was Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book Nocturnes, five stories about music and nightfall, and on Thursday it was Pete Hamill’s Downtown, his very personal memoir of Manhattan. (If I’d stuck with 2666 by Roberto Bolaño I’d be finished by now, but I’ve decided to ration it.)

My systems must also be doing backups of stored data, because I’ve been remembering things I haven’t thought of in years.

I told my friend Bert I was sleeping 10 or 11 hours straight and reading a book a day. He said, “Are you depressed?” I think not, unless one can get depressed about having nothing to get depressed about. Maybe I’m absorbing the stress in the atmosphere, because it’s been a very difficult fortnight for many. I’m quite cheerful — not manic, but content. Deadlines met, obligations fulfilled, home situation stable, cats perfect, relationships fine.

Could it be that I was exhausted by all the work required to get to this point of relative contentment, and my unplanned vacation is the result of that exhaustion? Maybe it is as simple as not knowing how to live without chaos. I must enjoy it while it lasts.