Sudden bout of insomnia.
Unusual for me, but my mind has been somewhat preoccupied with some personal life stuff. I've been thinking about being in Houston and whether or not that makes sense for me anymore, especially given that the original impetus for my being here at all was my ex-wife's job, prior to the whole ex bit. Presently, the only concrete thing keeping me here is my kid and my desire for us to remain in one another's lives. But aside from that, there really is very little about my being here that makes any sense. No job, no regular clients, and very little semblance of a personal network. Granted, the place I've set up here is a great “base of operations” to live and work from (and it took me a pretty long time to set up too), but I've always been of the conviction that your place of residence ought to be where you know the most people (community is everything)—especially once past a certain age—and that is a box that Houston does not check. And I highly doubt it will ever check given that half the people in this ludicrous sprawl of a “city” (mostly comprised of single-family homes) seems to be in the oil & gas field. I'm all for being a positive force of change in one's environment, but I'd be delusional to think that a city like Houston can be bent and shaped into the kind of city I'd like to live in, at least in my lifetime. An awful lot would have to change. While fighting an uphill battle is not something that is at all foreign to me, this would be one of the uphilliest battles imaginable, uphillier even than the take-down of dictators, believe it or not. They really love their big cars and freeways out here in ways I have seen nowhere else, and the whole car thing is a major antithesis to my very being. Has been for a long time, even way before reading Boyer's NO MORE FOSSILS (the reading of which only solidified my convictions).
A curse and a blessing of mine is a certain problem-solving mode my brain seems to enter whenever presented with an issue, and presently the problem-solving nodes seem to be very active without managing to accomplish any actual solving of problems. Hense, I imagine, the insomnia.