Even more exhausted today as the sleep debt mounts, and the storms keep waking me up. Oh, to be able to sleep at night when the storms and motorcycles are much less likely to disturb me.

I crashed around 3:00, but just two hours later, we had a power failure for the second day in a row. After waking up from a dream where the good Kim was telling me she was worried about getting fired from her job—maybe she was some kind of whistleblower—I managed to fall back asleep.

Then the thunder began, and I was up for hours before finally dozing off again. By that time, my lungs were tight, and my back hurt like hell. When my lungs get really tight, I sometimes feel pain between my shoulder blades, as if I were karate chopped there. Good thing I just got a new inhaler because I needed it. I took half a melatonin and a couple of ibuprofen for the pain.

As is usually the case when my sleep gets interrupted, I finally dragged myself out of bed shortly before 2:00 a.m., utterly exhausted. I tried to nap a few times but couldn’t, despite being so tired.

The last time I got up, it was after dreaming that it was 2029. In 2026, I had a scary medical event, and I was thinking about how it had already been three years and how time was flying. I don’t think anything could scare me as much as what happened in 2014.

When the thunder wakes me up again tonight, I’m sure I’ll be even more exhausted. I swear, every time I seem to get on a roll with energy, storms or nightmares knock me off track. I’m so sick of this and not being able to take up any other form of exercise consistently, knowing I wouldn’t be able to stick to it often enough to really benefit. I can’t go into strength training like this, I can’t get back on the vibration platform, and I can’t walk or jog consistently. The glider is better than nothing, but I don’t think I’ll have the energy for that today. I only got a few miles in yesterday too. Finished the New York and UK rides and just started Australia.

I was thinking back to the times in my 20s and 30s when my sleep would be broken up by asthma attacks before I quit smoking. For the most part, once I settled the attack, I was able to go back to sleep and usually felt okay once I got up. Why has it gotten so hard for me to handle broken sleep? I swear the NHA or jail would literally kill me these days. Literally. I just don’t get why it’s gotten so hard for me to handle sleep disturbances and sleeping in chunks. I know I’m older, but still. Perhaps sleep apnea and my thyroid really do affect me more than I gave them credit for, and they’re just throwing fuel on the fire. I wish I could know if the Inspire would help.

I still wonder about the possibility of something cursing my sleep. If that’s the case, it’s going to bypass anything I do to try to help myself.

I’m even more convinced there’s no God. With each passing year, I’m more and more convinced of this, and I figure I’ll eventually become 100% convinced. I’m at about 90% now. That’s because I prayed to whatever may be out there to please not let my sleep be disrupted since I was so tired and needed to catch up.

Okay, help me out here. If there really were a God, why would He say no to that? Why would He be like, “Nah, fuck your sleep. I don’t care if you get woken up; I’m going to let it happen.”

So yeah, I’m a little more convinced nothing’s up there and that the stories I’ve heard about people who claim to have been in the afterlife while they were temporarily clinically dead are just hallucinations that seemed so real they believed what they saw was real. The brain is a very weird and complex thing that we don’t fully understand.

Anyway, Tom is slowly fixing the wall tiles I messed up and is doing a much better job of it than I ever could. I’m great at home decorating, but not at home improvements.

We took out the center leaf of the table, and it really opens up the kitchen. It’s so nice to be able to walk around the table to get to the cabinets and shelves.