OK, that explains it

Dar woke up a little while ago; I was telling her about what happened, and it's as I figured. She said that the steroids I've started taking kicked in and set my adrenaline pumping. Thwump. Instant wake-up call.

They seem to be wearing off or settling down or whatever the appropriate metaphor is, so I'm going to see if I can get back to sleep for a bit. Assuming that the Pixel kitten will make room for me, of course.

What the hell was that?

That was very weird. I awoke suddenly, almost violently, at around 2AM. It was very, very strange; I literally just came awake. The front of my nightshirt was soaked. Not my skin, just my shirt. My pillow felt damp, but my hair was dry. What the hell? There was also an acrid smell.

I don't know. I'm going to blame it on the meds, which are increasing in number and kind. I've been having a terrible time getting this asthma under control (in case you haven't realized that from the 478 posts I've made about that in the past few weeks), so Dar has me taking a couple new things in addition to what I've already been using. Something's gotta work, right? Dar and I discussed the option of me going to the ER on Friday morning, just to see if they could come up with something else to do, but I decided to take a wait and see stance. Well, wait and see and try some things on our own here.

So I've been up for about 2 hours now, and I can't see sleep sneaking up and carrying me off any time soon. At least my breathing has settled down, so yay. I wrote a bit in a journal (paper not electronic), browsed around the blogs. I want to go out to the kitchen to get something to gnosh on, but Dar is asleep on the couch, and I don't want to chance waking her up. She's been working herself to the bone lately and not getting much sleep. I feel guilty as hell at not being much help to her; I know the reason, I know that it's at her insistence, but it really doesn't mitigate how I'm feeling about it. It's not in my nature to sit around and watch other people work, but intellectually I know that this forced inactivity will give my lungs a chance to recover and I'll be back to rights sooner rather than later. Sucking it up is a lot easier advice to give than to take :)

I think a part of the problem with my sleeplessness, if not my breathing, is that I'm getting scared witless over the seeming inevitability of Bush going to war with Iran. This is looking like it's a fait acompli. I spend most of my time online reading political blogs and alternative and/or non-US press sources. You learn a lot when you go outside of the mainstream. At the World Economic Summit in Davos, the reps from Europe and the ME were holding discussions on how to deal with a world post-Iran war. Everything I've been reading has been putting the timeframe somewhere between April and June with April being the most likely time for Bushco to start bombing. The speculation is that he'll be targeting either the nuclear facilities themselves, or else supply lines. Either way, we're in for a world of shit, folks. The BBC noted that once the war starts, the price of oil will most likely rocket to over $100 a barrel. And that's just one small economic shockwave. The real price will come in bloodshed and destruction.

I read reports of what it's like in Baghdad. The MSM (mainstream media) duly note the US soldiers killed and any reports of suicide bombs or mortar attacks, but they don't go into the fact that every day - every day - dozens of bodies are found not only in Baghdad but also in other cities around Iraq where the civil war is raging. The bodies of people who've been tortured and executed. Most of the schools and colleges have been closed down. There is no infrastructure, there is no working government. We did that. We set that in motion. And Bush is ready to do it again.

Why won't anyone stop him? What the fuck good is a non-binding resolution going to do? Besides piss him and the neocons off and send them into another paroxysm of "You think you can stop me? Well watch this, bitches." The more you tell Bush he can't do something, the more he'll show you that no tells him what to do. He's fucking psychotic. His whole Jonestown administration drank the Kool-Aid and they're ladling it down the throats of the rest of the country. It's a nightmare, and no one is trying to wake us up.