I don't think I've ever had all that much trouble sleeping throughout my life.

In my teens I was too exhausted to do anything but collapse. In my twenties, too busy living life and working.

In my thirties and early forties: too drunk.

Here, at fifty, I am developing periodic insomnia. It's creeping up, that state of being I've so often read about that older people encounter. The inability to fall asleep and stay asleep for a solid seven hours.

I would like to pinpoint a specific stress that kept me awake. But I can't isolate it.

It's a little like the night before my wedding, five years ago. I tried to fall asleep next to my soon-to-be wife Penny and couldn't. She was out like a light. I woke her up an hour into my tossing and turning and explained I couldn't sleep.

well what's bothering you, she asked me from under the covers in our hotel room.

everything, I told her, thinking of, in no particular order, all of the guests I'd have to talk to, the speech I had to remember by heart, the fact that I'd have to dance in front of all of them, the bags under my eyes that would mark me as a nervous groom for all to see, and the unrelenting fear that I would let everyone down somehow.

She chortled, said she couldn't help me with that, and fell back asleep.

It was like that last night. everything.

It started with the oncoming heat wave. It will be a hundred degrees for five straight days. I will run the A/C in the house relentlessly, burning through electricity that comes from oil and natural gas and makes the climate change problem worse. I will do it anyway because I need to be at least semi comfortable to function. It is like the Gojira song "A Sight to Behold" – I used to just not get the waste of the planet... I try not to get it anymore.

I try to block out the knowledge of myself and my actions making everything worse. I try to not feel like I caused this heatwave and I am contributing to this problem. I try to think better, more rational thoughts, like I am one of eight and a half billion people on this planet and what I do personally doesn't matter. I installed heat pumps so we use that instead of oil. I put solar panels on the house. I can run the fucking A/C through the heat wave.

When I was a teenager in Connecticut, heat waves were 90 degree weeks. Thirty years later and they are 100 degree weeks, even though I'm further north.

Where are we going with this thing, climate change? Certain doom.

My shoulder hurts, my neck hurts – I pinched a nerve a week ago or perhaps strained a muscle or perhaps both – and the discomfort makes it hard to find a good resting position. Every new shape I put myself in feels comfortable for a grand total of two minutes and then the hot poker heat comes back and I feel the need to shift again. don't shift, you just haven't waited long enough for things to relax.

no no shift, this is not right you know it, you can't sleep directly on this side.

And so on. Which leads to thoughts of my doctor's appointment today – I'm having the other shoulder evaluated, my left, because I have cysts and a degenerative compressed nerve. I think about having to take the afternoon off work to manage the appointment and what I'll say to the doctor when he recommends surgery. Fine, let's do it, most likely. Better to do now at 50 than wait. Do it now, do the recovery, build the muscle back up, stop the degeneration.

But what will the planet look like in 70 years? Why bother with your shoulder?

Then I think about how I must, immediately following the appointment, go home, get my dog Shelley, throw her in the car, drive down to Quincy in rush hour, pick up Penny from the WheelChair Van Rental service, and listen to her stories about taking her 78 year old mother who suffers from Alzheimers to get her infusion of experimental drugs that may or may not be marginally helping her, all without snapping at her because those treatments cost seven and a half thousand dollars each and this is the sixth treatment which means, do the math with me, we have blown forty five thousand post-tax dollars on these treatments for her sick mother in a world where I have difficulty buying the brand name soy sauce at the grocery store because it is fifty cents more than the generic.

These thoughts are worse than the others, thinking about the money makes me clench and I forcibly turn my thoughts to other things.

I try to count backwards from 100 to 1. I do it twice. Both times other thoughts interrupt. The work cutover we are re-attempting on Wednesday night at 9PM. Tom Scryleus on Youtube talking about Orwell and the history of man and work and being exploited in general. we are all being exploited, he says, and I know it, I've known this since I was fourteen delivering newspapers that cost customers a buck each while I was paid almost nothing. That's the capitalist way. I think about not working and that's somehow worse because what will i do to fill the time?

Nothing helps.

At six thirty my wife wakes up and notices I'm already awake and she asks me why and I tell her I was having bad dreams and she asks what was it about and I can't tell her because I am a man and men do not share these things, I will no longer tell her everything the way I did the night before our wedding. She needs me to be strong.

It was a dream that I lost my arms, I said, channeling the bit of truth about my body-decay fears, the surgery, the pinched nerve and burning feeling in my neck and shoulders. But it was okay, I told her. They put robot arms on.

Robot arms?

Yeah. One arm had a cleaver on the end so I could still cook. The other had a hand, but not a good one like Luke in Star Wars. A junky one. The fingers didn't work.

Well that's the US Healthcare system for you, she said.

I pushed my face into her arm and stopped her from getting out of bed for a few minutes of peace before starting what is sure to be a horrible day, trying to remind myself that it's not all bad, despite what I often feel in the moment, alone in my head.