Feeling strung out and achy and tense and strained today, for some reason. I feel very tired, and yet, I can’t sleep. Every time I try to take a nap, I get around an hour of zero rest sleep and wake up tense and restless and feeling like I accomplished nothing. Like I got close to sleep and just stopped at the gate without going in, leaving me still longing for it. I don’t know what the fuck is up with that.

My head hurts all the time. I feel irritable and snappish. I have a hunted feeling and part of me just wanted to grab the nearest object and smash it into little pieces then throw it out the window.

I have been like this, on and off, a fair bit lately. I am not sure what the hell is happening with me, but I am growing pretty tired of feeling like this. It’s a very stressful mental state. I feel tight and dry and hard and my joints make me feel like I should be waiting for Dorothy to come along with her oilcan. Or something. Hey, does that shark cartilage shit work for joint pain? I am willing to try anything right now.

Mental note : I have GOT to remember to buy some more el cheapo acetominophen soon. This is exactly the circumstances in which I would usually take a nice fat 2000 mg (or 2 g) does and hope to does the trick. Usually, it does. The analgesic blunts the edge of the pain and lets me relax and get some decent sleep, and that puts me on the mend.

But I am fresh out, and I keep forgetting to go next door to Shopper’s Drug Mart and get more. That way, I can Pay With Points(tm) and save my precious cash.

See, technically, I do hundreds of dollars of business via my many, many prescriptions with Shopper’s Drug Mart, and hence they reward me with Shopper’s Optimum Points. Of course, it’s the province that pays for the drugs, but I get to keep the points anyhow.

So now and then, I go in and do my drug store type shopping there. I do all this at Shoppers because they have the Optimum program and “pay with points”, which is like the coolest point reward system ever, because there is no bullshit catalog of “prizes” they expect you to drool over and dream of “earning” like you are selling subscriptions to Grit.

Nope. A certain amount of points equals a certain amount of money off your total at the cash register, period. The only things it’s not good for are things that technically Shoppers doesn’t sell you itself but is only the “sales agent” for, like lottery products and tobacco. Everything else is fair game.

It was a brilliant move by Shopper’s to make their reward program work like that, so I am quite happy to get my drugs. Plus, as it’s next door, the staff knows me there and is nice to me.

It’s sad how much energy even typing this drivel is taking out of me. I had a far more ambitious idea for a column today, but I just could not put two shits together to focus and write it. Maybe tomorrow.

Hopefully, I will feel better by the time it is time to go to Boston Pizza for dinner with my friends. Right now, I am not sure I am fit company for man or beast, feeling as tense and random as I do. But I am hopeful that a shower and a snack and lots of fluids will have me feeling better before then.

And typing all this out, however painful it has been, has made me feel somewhat better. The thing about writing as catharsis is that it’s very incremental. You get tiny releases of tension with each word instead of some big blast of emotional energy into the sky, and so it takes a certain amount of patience to even get started and reduces that internal pressure just a little bit at a time.

It’s hardly a method for instant release.

That’s writing for you, though. It’s inherently slow. There is no Jackson Pollack method of writing where you just fling words at a canvas with the sheer force of your passion. At best, you can type a furious stream of consciousness like some sixties beat poet and declare that whatever you end up with is the “soul of the moment” and therefore art.

Good luck getting anyone to read that shit, though, let alone pay for it.