Wholesome Sleep Habits

A loosely followed Ben Franklin schedule works best for me:

Rise at six

From six to nine: prepare for the day

From nine to one: work

From one to two: rest

From two to six: work

From six to ten: evening activities

From ten to six: rest

I can legally cheat by spending the six-to-ten evening activities period in bed reading myself to sleep. Then I stay in bed until six am. This helps bring me around to healthy sleep habits.

Also it helps me to spend the first eight hours winding myself up for work. And the last eight hours winding down for rest.

No rx drugs for me. Just carefully chosen medicinal foods and herbal teas.

 The Vikings

A matter of economics. They were a warring people. It was their nature just as it is the nature of some others to be 'peaceful' people. They called themselves 'berserkers' owing to the frenzy they would whip up before attacking.

 In real life when people speak or behave in a way that I don't care for, I thump my cane on the floor, hard. I learned it from Bruce Lee. Scares the hell out of people, I don't know why. 

So I do it all the time, just for fun.

 House of Cards.

In order to push our house of cards forward we have created all manner of new and unnecessary professions. Realtors, paralegals, travel agents, decorators, compliance specialists, lobbyists, telemarketers ...

It's a wholesome feeling to be truly useful, even essential in society, as for example a cook, a baker, a candlestick maker.

 On Death

All I do all day every day is maintain, maintain, maintain. There's little time left over for fun or progress. When the day comes that there's no time or opportunity for good times, and no change in sight, that's the day I should question the value of my life.

It will be best then to embrace the inevitable if only for the sake of the eternal dreamless rest that I can look forward to.

Life is for the living. Just keeping up with laundry and bill paying is not living. Yet, now I think about it, it's all I've ever done.

But it's getting late and I'm probably cross. Anyway, now I think about it, it's the thinking I do during all this maintaining that is fun.

 From the stuff of stars to the atom, from meteor ash to dust, we're here then we're gone like a fart in the wind.

"We are made of star-stuff." --Carl Sagan

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." --Book of Common Prayer