Enough Already, and a Soporific

His visage is sweet and loving and all that, but I've been informed enough is enough with the Mahareshi. I've been swamped and uninspired, probably half-suffocated by SAD...such an appropriate acronym. What a winter! Ten degrees this morning, with lovely, sparkling drips of ice growing down the screen of my big office window. I love this window.



This winter is reassuring, though: a short-term salve for worries about global warming. I keep wondering, is this the last hard winter of my life? I don't feel like complaining. Each day of hard freeze seems like a reprieve.

Trouble sleeping -- part deep-winter angst, part post-menopause, part too much work before LA -- and so yesterday I picked up a little brown vial of melatonin, 500 mcg. I tried melatonin in the 90s during a bad time of life, both parents and a dear friend dying, professional travails, and it worked well until my dreamlife turned on me with frightening nightmares. A dozen years on, I'm ready to try it again.

So I pop the little pill an hour before bedtime, and the damn thing gets stuck in my gullet. No matter how many times I swallow, I can feel it clinging to the left side of my esophagus. I make a cup of (consciously chosen) Sleepytime tea and gulp iit slowly; the bolus is still there, stuck. Who can fall asleep with that going on? Frustrated, I click "sleep" on my bedside radio and trust the monotonous midnight BBC will do the trick, and it does, even its catastrophic catalog about Kenya and Kosovo. At least this night there's news of Obama's latest wins, a remarkable momentum. Daring to hope for change, I finally fall asleep, my last-ditch melatonin eventually melting in my throat.