At hour five in the desk chair, the document onscreen looked like a winding road toward a mountain pass. Cyclists call this feeling “the man with the hammer.” Applying the parlance to the Sitzfleisch life, I told myself that I was bonking. The endurance athlete, running perilously low on fuel, is said to hit the wall, or bonk. A recent headline in the Guardian: “Extravagant eye bags: How extreme exhaustion became this year’s hottest look.” And yet the mind roamed: Covid? Lyme? Diabetes? Cancer? It’s no HIPAA violation to reveal that, as various checkups determined, none of those pertained. Could one attribute it to the wine the night before, the cookies, the fitful and abbreviated sleep, the boomerang effect of the morning’s caffeine and carbs, a sedentary profession, middle age? That will be a yes.
By the standards of my younger years, I was burning the candle at neither end.
Still, the ebb, lately, had become acute, and hard to account for.
