This morning I’m thinking about how much I wish I was still asleep.

I woke up at 4am again, and tossed and turned for an hour before trying first to write in my journal, and then deciding to go ahead and write this on my Web-log here (I hate that word, actually. I like the word “blog,” have been using that even though I’m sure it’s now passe, that it has been yeeted along with every other “world wide web” term by the new generation who talk more about wifi than internet; but I’ve always hated “weblog” because it looks like “we blog.” And we do, oh yes we do blog, precious; but that’s now how the word is said, it’s said “web log” because it’s a log kept on the web — but there’s no way to indicate that without adding a space or a capital letter or a hyphen, all of which ruin the visual indication that this is where the word “blog” comes from, a shortening of “web log.”) what thoughts are running around in my head and keeping me from going back to sleep.

This. This is what I think about when I wake up at 4am. Along with the thoughts, “God, I’m tired” and “I should really get more sleep” and “Today’s going to suck.” See why I said yesterday that my brain, like everyone else’s brain, is unwell and disordered and just — stupid? Because I really do need sleep, and my brain knows it, but yet somehow it can’t stop thinking “Man, I’m really tired. I should be sleeping now. I’m not though. This day’s going to be awful.”

I would like to apologize in advance to everyone today for my crankiness and slowness, for my confusion and my general inability to remember anything or to think clearly. I blame my idiot 4am brain.

No, the main thing that’s waking me up, and has been all week, is this: we need to move. We’re downsizing to save money, and our lease is up, and we need to find a new house. We want one that is cheap but decent, and that has a good yard with a solid fence for our dogs and our tortoise, who lives in the yard.

That right there is the first problem we’ve been having: most places don’t have a fenced yard, or don’t allow dogs, or don’t allow TWO dogs, or don’t allow anything but small dogs. And if you’re not a dog person, okay, fine, sure, you don’t want hair in the place and you don’t want poop in the yard and you’re scared that they’ll bark or dig. But if you’re willing to allow me to have a dog, what is the problem with me having two dogs? You think two dogs will bark more than one? Are you afraid they’ll fight? Is there some calculation in your head that says the place is too small for that much canine mass? I mean– can’t you let me handle those problems? If you don’t want dogs, fine; but if you allow dogs, what’s with the weight limit? If it’s an apartment without a yard, again, that’s fine, I understand; I wouldn’t move my dogs into a place that didn’t have a yard for them, but lots of people do that, and I think it’s wrong, too; but with tiny lap-dogs it’s much more manageable, so in that case, you can say that you don’t mind tiny yappy puppers. But if you have a yard, why couldn’t I have as many large dogs in there as I can cram in? Why does the landlord care how many dogs I have? Is there a fear that too much will create a canine supernova, which will then collapse into a doggo-black hole?

At any rate, once we find a place, we’re going to have to downsize and get rid of stuff, and we’re going to have to move.

And that’s it. That’s the thought. That’s what keeps me up at night, why I can’t sleep, why I am currently seeing double because my eyes won’t focus well, and having trouble typing because my fingers are not hitting the right keys in the right sequence. Because I’m going to have to get rid of stuff, and then move the remaining stuff from one house to another, and put it all away.

I don’t know why I’m having trouble with this. Sure, there is anxiety about the house hunting: will we find a place that we like? Will we still like it once we move into it with all of our possessions and our pets? What about our neighbors, will they drive us crazy? Will we hate living there after six or eight months? All of that is one thing; but this morning I was thinking about stuff. I was trying to picture how we could cram our current possessions into the condo we looked at yesterday — which was a dump, by the way, as per our expectations; it was in a good neighborhood and it was dirt cheap, but that was because of all the dirt.

Now: why? Why was I trying to make decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of? Why was I worrying that we wouldn’t have room in the garbage can for the junk I’ll want to throw away, junk that has accumulated in our back yard simply because we have room for it, and I haven’t bothered getting rid of it before now? Garbage? 4am, I’m exhausted, and I’m literally worrying about garbage.

Garbage.

I think I need to clear my brain out, too.

That also, I have to say, represents most of the stuff that we’ll need to downsize and get rid of: things we just haven’t bothered to remove because we had room for it. The house we’re in now is quite large, four bedrooms for the two of us and our pets; the bird has his own bedroom. So we have the chair that isn’t as comfortable as it used to be, but we kept because our Boxer mix likes curling up in it. We have a bookshelf full of CDs that only I listen to any more, and that rarely because most of them are either uninteresting to me, or are already ripped onto our iTunes. If I just consolidated my tools, and cleaned out the half-empty plastic bags of hardware that has been left over after assemblies and repairs and installations over the last few years, I’d be able to put all of my home-repair stuff into one medium box.

I just haven’t done it. Because we’ve had room to store everything, so why worry about it?

And now, it seems, it’s time to worry about it. Except there’s nothing to worry about. Not even the move itself: it’s now May, and school will end in three weeks (And THANK GOD FOR THAT), and then we’ll have nothing to do but move; while we’ll need one day with a U-Haul truck and friends to help us move the big furniture, the rest we can do in small trips with our car. We’ve done this many times before, and it’s never been hard, and it won’t be hard now. It’ll be good for us, in fact, because we really should get rid of all of our clutter; it’s not sparking any joy for us.

Now someone, please, I beg of you: explain that to my 4am brain. Because the one thing that will make this move hard is if I can’t get enough sleep.