Sleepless Nights

From in the wee hours of the night, not once, but many of them, often, sleepless in Providence: “...Must be the 26th. Awake for an hour or more, tossing, turning. I cannot shut the brain down, give it a rest. I cannot sleep. Thoughts roil, unstoppable, an stream, a tumult of unanswerable questions. It’s supposed to snow; where is it and when will it arrive? I cannot find a job. No one returns my inquiries, even when I’ve looked at things normally so far beneath consideration for my experience, they should grab me on the spot. Instead, I fear, they probably ask themselves: what's wrong with this guy? He's "overqualified," "there must be something wrong with him" and so on. I have no home; just half of one, wife and dogs in New York, Dad and daughter in a rented apartment three hours' drive away. I am worried, so qualified, yet unemployed and from my midnight perspective, not employable? Why is it so hard? I must be weird. I wonder where my hat is? The cap with the Princeton “P” and its crossed oars that I left at the bar a week ago, drunk and oblivious to my own well-being. What a disgrace; fortunately, something I do by accident about once in a decade. I am not an alcoholic, this much I know is true! That is the easy question: I wonder who I am, where I am and what I’ll be when I grow up? I am on the verge of losing my bearings, my sense of where I am headed, even where I've been at times. Maybe this is extreme; it is, nonetheless, sobering, a frightening experience. Neither a patient nor an inmate, like the brother that I do not keep, I know the difference is a thin one, the merest of fine margins and something that I do not care or dare measure.