From Sunday to Monday, I slept better and then felt better getting up, but by 4 pm I am more or less exhausted. We’ve worked well today and I am confident I can finish the project I came here to do. After a modest dinner, Pancake and I walk to the Place des Abbesses, buy ice cream, watch people pass by, and, since it looks like rain, beat a path back to the apartment. It’s a gray evening, but like every evening, it’s loud with the voices of revelers and tourists in the street outside. Taking my hearing aids out I’m left with a distant muffled roar.
Perhaps because my sleep cycle has been shifted, I now dream often just before waking up. I retain my dream in my waking state. Sometimes the dreams have a disturbing or frightening content, but I do not experience fear or alarm in my dreams. In my most recent dream, I found myself mounted on a bicycle at the confluence of several wide multi-lane thoroughfares which seemed to lead toward the divergent localities of my past. I was aware that a bicycle was not suitable for my powers or for the journeys that lay before me, but it didn’t seem to matter much. I had all the time in the world and would arrive in any case. In other dreams, I am pursued by assailants or giant bats, but I am not really alarmed or terrified. I also find that in my dreams the neighborhood around my apartment is beginning to fade into the terrains of my past life. They all consist of human places which are at root the same because human beings are the same. The past: isn’t it just the endless doors I didn’t enter?
What is unfortunately changing is my physical condition. I notice now that typing is becoming more difficult. I’m constantly hitting wrong keys. Walking is more of an ordeal. In my imagination, I like to think that if only I were back home in the YMCA, everything would click and I would leave refreshed and strengthened. When I grip things now, I get painful cramps in my forearms. Even a short walk exhausts me and leaves me bathed in sweat. My legs feel on the verge of giving way with every step.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 