I swear, the biggest and most popular lie I tell myself is that “I will remember that later”.

Like hell I will. It’s use it or lose it. I am the kind of person who has a lot of ideas but the only way to save the good ones is to record them in some fashion. Otherwise, they will disappear back into the roiling chaos of the creativity which gave them birth.

Like I have said many times before, I have a very busy mind. I always have a ton of processes running at the same time and at varying levels of consciousness. Ideas I am developing, emotions I am (slowly) processing, issues I am contemplating, and so much more.. This taxes my mental resources and it especially taxes the harried little dynamic load balancer that has to keep everything going while avoiding a total mental breakdown.

It works so hard. I honestly wish I could give it a vacation sometimes. Shut down the shop and let the whole complex apparatus cool off for a while.

I dunno, maybe that is what I do when I almost-sleep. I just relax my mind and let it zero out for a while, let processes complete and emotions come through.

It’s not that I have stopped thinking and achieved a kind of Zen-like oneness, though that sounds like it would be awesome. It’s that I stop trying to control my thoughts and kind of just relax and watch the show.

It’s a tad like lucid dreaming, in the sense that I am part asleep and part awake. Like I have said before, I can’t find the words to express how it is not actual sleep. It’s very close to it, but I never actually enter the dream state. It’s the state right before actual sleep, where you are totally relaxed but still very dimly aware if your surroundings.

In some ways it’s better than sleep, because I get some of the benefits of sleep without having to deal with my as of this moment untreated sleep apnea.

I suppose that I should make it one of my missions for this downtime to get back into using my CPAP machine. If I can get re-acclimated to it, I will probably have a lot more energy and get a much higher quality of life as a result.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

But it;s really hard to do in practice. It’s such a crazy and unnatural thing to do, to put this mask over my face and turn on this machine that makes sounds like Darth Vader enjoying phone sex and then try to sleep.

I did it for a while, and I am proud of that. But the results weren’t exactly dramatic, and I stuck with it for at least three months, so you would think by then I would be feeling something at least.

But no, nothing drastic. I felt a bit better, that’s all. Maybe it needed adjusting and I would have gotten the dramatic results if the settings were right, I dunno. Or maybe my real problem is depression and no machine can help me with that.

Not even Doctor Vibe’s Orgasmatron.

It never writes, it never calls.

So the problem with me versus CPAP is that the results do not justify the effort of will it takes to ignore all the weirdness. Trust me, if I had experienced the sort of quality of life boost that I had been promised, not only would I have never stopped using it, I would have built an altar around it and worshiped it, and sung its praises for all to hear.

But nope. So you can see why one scare where I woke up gasping for air was all it took for me to give up on the goddamned thing.

The fact that smothering is one of my all time worst fears didn’t help either. Although now that I am thinking of it, maybe I got that fear from apneic sleep. They say that sleep apnea reduce lung capacity over time, and I can believe it, because I personally have concluded that carbon dioxide pools in the bottom of my lungs and I have to regularly force it out in order to get back the lung capacity it displaced.

It’s sad that the previous sentence is the most cogent and understandable explanation of the problem that I have come up with yet.

If I am right and my issue is carbon dioxide, then the problem is one of insufficient exhalation, and blowing air down my throat with CPAP isn’t going to help with that. In fact, what I would need then is the opposite sort of machine… one that help draw air OUT of my lungs with a finely tuned kind of suction.

Even if that’s not possible for sleeping, it would be a wonderful thing to have when I first wake up in the morning. Wake up, yawn, stretch, vacuum my lungs and replace all the bad, used up air with refreshing fully oxygenated air in the ideal nitrogen/oxygen ratio.

It sounds like a joke, but if there really was a machine like that, I would do whatever it took to get myself one.

Given my near-constant state of mild oxygen starvation, I suppose I should be easier on myself for being absentminded and easily confused. For all I know, I might be sharp as hell if I was getting enough air.

But it’s a self-feeding thing. I am always tired so I have low activity levels. Low activity levels are ideal for lowering metabolic demand for oxygen. When my activity level increases, demand exceeds supply and I feel like I am dying. So activity levels stay low.

Which brings up another issue : exercise. I am used to walking twelve blocks a day, four days a week, in order to get to school and back. Now that I am on vacation, there is nothing forcing me to get out and walk.

Which means I will lose my precious conditioning and it will take some time to get it back when school starts again. Unless I somehow develop the self-discipline to get myself to take walks on entirely my own volition.

I will try that out tomorrow. I under-shopped when getting my food and pop supplies on Wednesday, which means a two block and back trip to the local 7-11 is in order.

And while I walk, I will be quashing all negative thoughts and replacing them with positive thoughts about how nice it is to be outside and get a little exercise.

And if the weather is not too awful, that might even work.

I suppose I could write this whole idea about exercise and CPAP down.

But I am sure I will remember it later.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.