Sometimes things just don’t go the way you thought they would. Take this past week, for example. I thought my persistent, nightly use of the Sleep Apnea mouthpiece would ensure that I would be able to stay alert enough each day, in the evening after I got home from the day job, that I would be able to finish the review I began last week.
It didn’t exactly happen that way. And this afternoon, as I was trying to work my way through the article, I began feeling just like I had before I even began using the mouthpiece. Unfocused, a bit depressed, and above all else overwhelmed with the feeling that I needed to sleep.
Last night I got eight hours sleep. Eight hours. So it’s not as though I was burning the candle at both ends.
With the thought that a more interesting subject to write about might help, at about 2pm this afternoon I changed albums in mid-review. I went downstairs and grabbed one of my favorite jazz albums of all time and brought it up to my writing room. A lot of what I had previously written was salvageable, I thought, because the artist remained the same, and most of what I had “on paper” thus far was about the man, not the music.
Try as I might, I could not overcome the feeling that I needed to sleep. After an hour or so in which I wrote barely a hundred words, I gave in to the fatigue and went to my bedroom.
I did not wake up until two hours later.
The odd thing was, earlier in the day I had been feeling pretty damn good. I mean really good, almost as though there was no Sleep Apnea. It has been a long time since I felt really well, and today was not the exception. But after sleeping eight hours last night, I felt better than I have in at least a couple of years.
Maybe the mouthpiece just isn’t cutting it. I went for that as a first resort because I simply can’t imagine myself sleeping with a noisy machine sitting on my nightstand all night and a mask over my face pumping oxygen into my mouth and nose.
I have no choice but to continue on with the mouthpiece. I know my condition did not get this way overnight; it was a long, slow process. Thinking back to the symptoms that I didn’t know were symptoms, I have had this for at least three years, perhaps longer. Getting a little worse every day. It seems logical that reversing it will likewise take time.
::sigh::
Even though I was not able to finish the new article I had hoped to publish today, I was able to polish up a golden oldie from four years ago. It was one of the articles that originated on the Blogspot version of this blog, and the importation process which moved it from there to here did not work as well as it might have. A lot of paragraph breaks were eliminated and the formatting just look stupid.
I fixed all that. As complicated as it sounds, it was actually easier and faster than writing a new review. So please have a look at another of my favorite jazz albums, Sonny Rollins’ 1978 masterpiece, “Don’t Stop The Carnival” in JFASN #60.
Thanks for reading this.
Al Evans
Wood Village, Oregon
My original content, including photos other than album covers, Copyright © 2016 by Al Evans. All rights reserved.
jazz for a saturday night 