These are strange and stressful times for all of us. But I feel simultaneously more prepared and less able to deal with this state of emergency.

With the exception of the night before taking a long trip, I've never had much difficulty sleeping. Right now, though, I find myself being hit by a wave of intense energy sometimes between 4 and 5am. Unless I manage to get to sleep before than, I will be wide awake until late in the morning, at which point I rapidly start to fade.

Why is this happening? Part of it surely has to do with the fact that my daughter is thousands of miles away and -- for now -- eight hours ahead of me in France. I'm so used to being ready for her crises, which dominated the previous decade for me, that I often can't relax unless I can sense that she is doing alright.

But there's something else at work. And I think I just realized what. I have been sleeping in the front room, whether or a futon or sofa, for many years. When the landscapers did a pretty radical pruning job on our big mesquite last spring, they effectively removed a lot of the shade.

That wasn't so much of an issue during the summer months, when the mesquite leaves -- more like needles, really -- were thicker and the angle of the sun was different. But now, with the leaves more sparse and the sun shooting through our front bay window, I feel "turned on" somehow, even if I wear a sleep mask.

My daughter left for Las Vegas with friends this afternoon and is headed to France on the 17th for a semester abroad. Her mother is downtown at her new studio, where she will probably fall asleep on what used to be our sofa. I said goodnight to my father earlier than usual. And here I am, home alone, not feeling at home, confronted with the prospect of figuring out what to do with the rest of my life. The first step is to get back in touch with myself by writing.

I frequently feel like writing something longer and sometimes writing it here. Unfortunately, my windows of opportunity these days are five minutes or less most of the time, enough to compose a few sentences for Facebook or share something on Twitter, but not to produce a LiveJournal entry that meets my standards. And if I'm going to restructure my schedule in order to produce something more polished, I'm almost certainly going to do it for Souciant, since I'm supposed to fill a slot there every week. Even so, I often fail to complete my own projects lately and must rely on others to take my place.

When Souciant started, back in 2011, that rarely happened. But a whole series of circumstances -- some of which were documented here before I stopped posting consistently -- have reduced me to the fate of someone who is almost always in what political theorists call a "state of emergency". While I'm not a very anxious person by disposition, my daughter, her mother, and my father all are. And they are the individuals I interact with by far the most, now that the scope of my existence, in every sense, has been downsized.

I will say that, though I haven't written nearly as much for Souciant as I would like recently, I am prouder of the pieces that I've produced than used to be the case. Maybe it's because I only finish the ones that I care about, even if I do so belatedly. If you're interested, here's a run-down of my favorites of the past few years, a number of which also contribute substantially to the autobiograpy-in-fragments I started writing here on LiveJournal:

• On Kanye West's controversial recent statements and their connection with the function that rap has played for privileged white audiences since the 1980s (May, 2018)

• On my own contradictory upbringing with regard to race, being both hugely inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and drawn to the mystique of the Confederacy (August, 2017)

• On teaching Claudia Rankine's magnificent -- and disturbing -- book Citizen (September, 2016)

• On the debut of Twin Peaks' third -- and presumably final -- season and how it worked very hard to disable the conventional mechanisms of nostalgia (June, 2017)

• On one reason why Donald Trump's "childish" behavior might actually be regarded by his supporters as a sign of his freedom from external manipulation, looking back at the exaltation of immaturity in American culture (January, 2018)

• On the increasing marginalization of teaching within higher education (May, 2016)

• On my childhood favorite M*A*S*H looking very dated in light of the #metoo movement (November, 2017)

• On a blisteringly great set by Howe Gelb and his band Giant Sand, playing songs from their early album Valley of Rain (December, 2017)

• On the passing of Mary Tyler Moore and the important role her eponymous sitcom played in my life during a very difficult portion of my adolescence (March, 2017)

• On the perverse forms of pleasure that the Disney theme park experience provides (March, 2016)

• On my failure to produce an end-of-year list of favorite cultural commodities and decision to celebrate an unexpected snowfall instead (December, 2017)

Annoyingly, perhaps my favorite Souciant piece of all is not included in this list because I was forced to censor it retroactively for personal reasons. If I ever feel comfortable making it public in its original form, I'll try to remember to share it here as well.

Why did I suddenly feel it necessary to apparate here, amid the ruins of the LJ community I treasured? The main reason is that my daughter is spending the week in Chicago with her best friend, her first trip away from family not led by an organized group. I'm delighted for her to have this opportunity, if not a little envious. I miss her, of course -- she has been home all the time since her semester ended -- but also appreciate the sense that I have a little more room in which to maneuver.

Here's something I wrote during her previous time away from home, when she was hiking for two weeks in the High Sierra with Outward Bound back in July, 2016:

As much as I miss my daughter right now, I am also realizing how much I missed being me. There are many reasons, as I have tediously rehearsed in previous entries, why I more or less stopped updating this blog. One of the biggest, though, is proving to have been the sheer amount of time I have devoted to being a parent. That wasn't clear to me before, because I was too close to my situation to get critical distance from it. The more time I spend not consumed by my daughter's crises, both real and manufactured -- I'm not sure even she can tell the difference, frequently -- the more I recognize that I allowed them, as has long been my tendency with the problems of others, to become my own to such a degree that I sacrificed my own autonomy.

At the time, I was looking ahead to her starting college and imagining that I'd soon be confronting the "empty nest" panic that so many parents go through.

Things turned out differently, however. Although she stayed in the dorm a lot during her first year in college, the difficulty she experienced in trying to pursue activities that keep her anxiety manageable -- exercising, first and foremost, but also watching movie and television shows without fear of waking anyone up -- meant that she spent a good deal of time away from campus. Because she wasn't driving yet, I drove her back and forth to the gym and continued to accompany her to the junior high school track for her late-night running sessions. This past year, thanks to a roommate who was perpetually depressed and made her deeply uncomfortable, she was home even more.

I'm increasingly reluctant to explain these circumstances to other people, because they tend to be very judgmental. "You need to take time for yourself," they say. Or, "You need to let her grow up." And they have a point. But I decided years ago, at the onset of her worst period of adolescent crisis, that I would pursue a program of "harm reduction" rather than trying to accelerate her passage to maturity through tough-love strategies. Although, it may still prove to have been the wrong decision, it is one I arrived at following many hours of agonizing deliberation. I am happy to own it, yet would prefer not to be excoriated for doing so.

Anyway, in addition to the writing that I've managed to produce since I last posted anything substantial here, I've also spent a lot of time trying to help my daughter navigate the challenges of a massive public university while continuing to cope with extreme anxiety and the insomnia and despair that frequently accompany it. She is brilliant and incredibly talented as a painter and writer -- and not bad at music, either -- and doing tremendously well by "objective" measures, even though her corrosive self-doubt often has her on the verge of self-sabotage.

The good news is that she is making incremental progress on that front, though not fast enough for her taste. She still has panic attacks, particularly when something new is introduced into her routine. She still laments the fact that it's so hard for her to find someone her age who is interesting to talk with. She still lashes out, both at others and herself, because it is so hard for her to stay comfortable. Yet, the intensity and frequency of these hard times has been diminishing for a while now, with no dampening of the creative and intellectual fires that make her such a unique and wonderful human being. I worry about her. I am worried right now, since she is struggling to adjust to unfamiliar circumstances in Chicago. But I am also a lot more hopeful than I was for years, despite a whole bunch of other things in my family life going poorly right now.

I was trying to figure out why my photos aren't showing up here and decided to see whether entries from when I was posting regularly were still working correctly. I picked October 17th, 2007 at a random as the first date to check and discovered that the first entry posted on that day, for which the photo was not showing, had been titled "Blade Runner". This seemed a little spooky, since I had been planning to go see the sequel tonight before realizing that it was too long for me to see today. Here that photo, uploaded to LJ, which I took in New York just shy of one decade ago:

I was puttering about just now, getting the bikes ready for my almost-nightly ride with my daughter, when I suddenly found myself thinking about Live Journal and, more specifically, what led me first to taper off my output and then stop altogether. I have written before about my sense of alienation with regard to a platform that once played a huge role in my life, reaching conclusions that I still agree with. But this time the act of reflection felt different, more whole somehow, than it had previously.

It wasn't simply that I got burned my decision, back in late 2010, to create a filter in order to share a very difficult time I was going through. Nor was it that I had come to find it harder and harder to sustain my vision of family life in the face of frequently blatant contradiction. The technological explanation, that I had drifted from Live Journal once my life became so hectic that I started doing almost everything on my mobile phone, though undoubtedly significant, also fell short of the mark. The underlying problem, I finally realized tonight, was that I no longer felt capable of producing the sort of convolutions that I had established as my dominant mode here.

I had always told myself that I enjoyed being playfully indirect here, hiding the often painful truth of my day-to-day existence in plain sight. And I suppose I did take pleasure in the mechanics of subterfuge. But in reality this way of communicating was just a distraction from facts I was unwilling to face or, to be more precise, unwilling to be seen facing. Put bluntly, my journal had achieved a degree of deceit that I was no longer in the proper frame of mind to maintain.

So where does that leave things? Facebook, for all of its faults, continues to hold me in thrall because the brevity of what I post there makes it much easier to avoid confronting the deeper structural flaws in my world. I don't have to worry about being indirect because the very form of that social media platform guarantees that almost no one can piece together a clear picture of anyone else's existence. Live Journal, by contrast, demands -- or at least demands from me, because of how I have used it since 2003 -- that I either resume my former practice of crafting posts so lacking in clarity that even I have difficulty excavating their layers later on or find some new way of approaching what I do here. And there's also the fact that almost no one seems to spend much time on Live Journal anymore.

But maybe that's what I was waiting for, a "safe space" more like my journal was when I first began it, when I only had a few unconnected readers, rather than the far-too-public production that everyone at work seemed to be reading and, I suspect, commenting on behind my back. Part of me would welcome the opportunity to work in solitude, like a postmodern-day Thoreau. After all, if I want a large audience, I still have Facebook at my disposal. Here, by contrast, I can almost be certain, despite the fact that I have vowed never to post anything to a filter or even friends-only again, that very few people will read what I share and that the vast majority of that potential micro-public consists of people I am comfortable sharing almost anything with.

Although I started teaching last week, it won't really feel like I'm back into a somewhat regular schedule until Wednesday. Part of it is that my daughter doesn't start her classes until tomorrow. Part of it is that last week was a blur of stress, with Kim finishing up a massive work deadline and lots of teenager-related drama at home. I'm looking forward to feeling more grounded, though I know that there will be a rough adjustment thanks to the strange hours I've been keeping over the past month.

When I was a teenager, I was very nocturnal, frequently staying up until after 5am on school nights. I'd compensate by taking naps after school, but was still often underslept and over-agitated as a consequence. Unfortunately, Skylar seems to have inherited both this trait of mine and her mother's difficulty falling and staying asleep, whatever the circumstances. It's one of the principal reasons why the past few years have been so difficult -- not to mention why I have been scarce in these part -- since the schools she attended were not exactly accommodating to kids like her and her mother's work schedule and mine, to a lesser extent, are also at odds with her desire to stay up most of the night.

Over the past month, most of which coincided with my break, I have often found myself awake along with Skylar, while her mother attempts to sleep. Kim has never done well with late nights. And Skylar can be very demanding of parental time and energy when she is feeling low, which often happens in the wee hours of the morning. The head-trip in all that is that she probably starts to feel low because her sleep patterns are so irregular and out of sync with "normal" routines. But there simply isn't a way to correct the problem easily. If we couldn't make her fall asleep at a particular time when she was two, we certainly aren't going to be able to do it when she's sixteen!

I have been taking the approach of trying to be there for Skylar rather than letting her figure things out on her own. Quite a few people, including her mother, have told me that it's a mistake to indulge her in that way. And maybe they are right. My sense of things, though, is that it is better to talk to your teenager when she wants to talk out her worries than to let her brood by myself. I suppose time will tell whether I was mistaken in this conclusion. For now, though, I am just hoping that starting classes will help her adjust her schedule incrementally in the next few weeks and therefore help me to get good sleep on a more regular basis.