I feel like whining (I'm hitting serious physical, mental, and emotional walls right now) but after this sentence I will stop feeling sorry for myself.

There, that's better. I'm going to try to clear my brain now, and just watch, and write what I see.

I'm watching the shadow of a spiderweb rattle against the wall - it's trailing in the few inches between a light and the paneling, and draws a quivering black line above a framed inkjetted picture of Franklin W. Olin (you can see the scan lines and the paper buckling from when the ink was liquid).

Now I'm looking down, into the fireplace with faux logs and a tilted metal grille above that deflects the radiant heat out onto my knees and the back of my laptop. There's a little lick of yellow jetting out of a sheet of blue. The faux logs are hot enough to grow red. It doesn't look like tongues of flame - they're too soft and flickering too rapidly to be tongues. I see sheets of atoms wrapped up in their own reactions, throwing blanket of photons around themselves outwards, then swirling and slinging them out, sending an image of warmth onto my retinas.

My eyes bask in a faint heat of tiredness when I close them. I'm typing with my eyes closed now, leaning into a gigantic beanbag chair. I can feel my hands on the keyboards with the little "home key" nubs under my index fingers when I rest, my wrists stuck to the front of the laptop plate with sweat. My right shoulder is crunched up against my ear. I shake the elbow out and relax it. My back tingles with a slight ache. My feet are warm. I feel simultaneously light and heavy and pained, and a little bit floating. My toes are braced against the ledge of the fireplace.

When did my knees start aching? Why do my hips feel cramped like they haven't been stretched in ages, and why does my neck feel like it has been stretched, just in the wrong direction? Why does my body feel so old on the inside?

Wow. I really am bad at taking care of myself.