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I don't sleep like other people. "What? Upside-down in a closet?" asked someone at Radio Paradise. Well no but my sleep is very irregular.

This was first noticed by the maternity ward nurses in the hospital where I was born: I didn't want to wake up for my feedings.

In general I sleep far more than other people, but for most of my life I've had the odd ability to stay awake, and to do useful work, far longer than anyone else, but then crashing for two or three days. I can't do that anymore though. If I try, I pass out.

I was having seizures for several years. I don't really know but speculate that the seizures were due to my practice of staying awake for several days at a time. I haven't had a seizure since last summer, when I started taking Trileptal. It's a modified form of Tegretol, it apparently works the same way but has a somewhat different chemical structure so as not to be so harmful to the liver.

I also have the problem that I don't get tired when it's time to sleep. A friend says "It's like dying of dehydration because you don't know you're thirsty".

Realization of my recent depression dawned upon me because I was sleeping excessively. When I get depressed I sleep to much, when I sleep too much it makes me depressed. Taking antidepressants eventually led to my recent pattern of staying awake for hours into the night, then awakening early, long before the shelter staff wakes us. At the same time, my depression has lifted.

The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative

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Debate-Ducking Hillary Clinton in '08: Candidates Should Be Tough Enough to Debate "Anytime, Anywhere"

A Former Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies

According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.

The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told Baum. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Obvious? Sure. But it's important to get this kind of history explicitly out in the open so that mistakes can be corrected.

Here's the article at Harper's Magazine.

My life would be hard to face if I had to face it alone. But I don't, I have many friends online and off. I particularly want to thank you folks here at Soylent News. Your kindness means a great deal to me.

Too spicy for SoylentNews... not spicy enough for your job:

'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations

Dice, formerly the IT Job Boards, said it intended the images, which feature both men and women, to be light-hearted. Part of the drive behind the campaign was to counter the notion that people working in technology were "nerds".

Democracy is a joke, says China – just look at Donald Trump

“The rise of a racist in the US political area worries the whole world,” the party-controlled Global Times crowed this week ahead of of Trump’s victory in the latest round of primaries. “He has even been called another Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler by some western media.” It added, darkly: “Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for western democracy.”

Trump, or “Chuanpu” as they call him in China, has been a gift to Communist party spin doctors paid to convince the country’s 1.4 billion citizens that rule of the people is a sure path to chaos and destruction.

“They are relishing this moment,” says Zhou Fengsuo, a US-based democracy activist who fled his native China following the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. “They are very happy. They are laughing over this. To them [Trump] is a good character to show the deficiencies of the democratic system, that such a person could become president. It is just unbelievable. Beijing is definitely gloating over this.”

[...] Chinese newspapers, which have previously pounced on the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan revolution as evidence of the dangers of democracy, have wasted no time in hyping the potential turmoil that Trump’s rise could bring.

An editorial in the Chinese-language edition of the Global Times noted with glee that fighting had broken out at Trump rallies in what was supposedly one of the world’s “most developed and mature democratic election systems”.

[...] An editorial on another government-run website claimed Trump had “humiliated” the US political system. “He has turned the election into a prank,” it said.

Depressed people commonly want something they haven't got - love, money, a job, a better job. My present depression is not like that. I lost interest in everything, I sleep excessively, until a couple days ago I was vomiting after every meal, but there was nothing particularly that I wanted, whose acquisition promised to dispel this miserable rain cloud that's been following me everywhere.

Rather, I know now that time will take care of it. It always does. I don't know how much time but a bit of progress is that I went back for seconds at the Portland Rescue Mission's breakfast this morning, not because I was so hungry, but because the food tasted so good.

Actually it's been a while since food tasted good.

I was sleeping during the day at Right 2 Dream Too on Saturday, when I woke up my boots were gone. I was quite dismayed as I could not imagine being admitted to businesses barefoot, also it is still cold and wet here in Portland. But the R2D2 staff gave me a brand-new pair of shoes that someone had donated.

Tucked into my boots for "safekeeping" were my phone and my glasses.

I have a friend who helps me out with certain expenses, I can't just ask him for any amount of money but if I have something credible to spend it on he'll lend me some cash. He's going to buy me a new phone this weekend.

I don't know how I'll get new glasses. I'm not totally blind without them but it is irritating to have everything blurry.

Even all this doesn't get me down. It did at first.

Shit Happens.

WATCH: Florida Deputy Illegally Arrests PINAC Reporter Protesting At High School
Broadcast by honoryouroath + YouTube

Florida Sheriff’s deputies illegally enforced the “school safety zones” trespassing law against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray, outside of a St. Augustine high school earlier today. Gray complied with law enforcement orders, and is currently being held in the northeastern Florida St. Johns County jail, but oddly no charges are listed with his mugshot, unlike all of the other suspects as you can see below.

The St. Johns Sheriff’s Office has wanted to detain Gray for many months now, after the local schools Superintendent declared him persona non grata, even though Gray has a son currently attending St. Augustine High School and two other children in the system.

Jeff Gray was arrested while protesting with a sign in hand, the SLAPP lawsuit filed against him by St. Johns Schools last December. The legal action was filed along with 38 SLAPP letters sent to his home address by certified mail, one of which invoked Florida Statute 810.0975 and its “school safety zones.”

“How are you doing, Mr. Gray?” asked the Florida deputy as he got out of his patrol car, wearing street clothing, to which Jeff responded, “Pretty good. How are you?” “May I ask you why are you here?” asked the St. Johns sheriff’s deputy. “I am peacefully assembling and peacefully protesting,” replied Gray. “Ok. Do you realize [that] this is a violation of your no trespass order that was issued. Correct?” asked the deputy.

“No, it’s not actually. There’s a provision that that says “shall not infringe on the right to peacefully assemble and protest If you look in the statute, it’s right there,” said Gray, whose HonorYourOath YouTube page is famously filled with instances like these where the reporter very carefully expresses to the officers his statutory or constitutional rights, and he re-iterated for emphasis, “In the statute. That’s why I’m here.”

“This is within the 500 foot safety rule, so i’m putting you under arrest for violation of that trespass order,” replied the Florida deputy who seemed to suddenly remember that Gray is a reporter and would in all likelihood be recording the scene, “If you would, put your sign down, turn your phone off, put your hands behind your back, turn around please. Put your hands together like you’re praying, please.”

Gray surrendered to detainment. “If you look at the statute, there’s a provision…” said Gray as the sheriff’s deputy cuffed him. But Jeff Gray is right. The last sentence of the “School Safety Zones” statute reads: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to abridge or infringe upon the right of any person to peaceably assemble and protest.”

Hillary Clinton Falsely Credits Reagans With Starting ‘National Conversation’ on HIV/AIDS

Edit: BBC picked up on the story.

I was in the Emergency Room Sunday night for a profoundly stupid reason. I got a chest X-Ray. It showed a mass on my right lung. The ER doc told me to ask my primary care physician for a referral for a CT scan.

Her receptionist was real clueful, got me an appointment for Friday morning. I expect the CT scan will be next week - they're not like MRIs, there's no real wait time for CT scans in the US.

It could be a benign growth. The usual practice is to watch the mass over some period of time. Cancer will grow quickly, benign growths slowly or not at all.

Cancer will have a rough surface, which will show in a CT scan but not an X-Ray.

It would suck to die young, but I feel I've accomplished what I set out to do, that being to teach others, in the form of my writing.

The stupid reason that I was in the ER is that my insurance and psychiatrist and so my pharmacy are all in Washington State. I've been staying in Oregon due to the ready availability of food and shelter. That means I need bus fare to pick up my meds.

I've had a real bad cold, so I could not sing on the street to raise the money for the bus.

Now there are other ways I could have gotten my medicine. I guess the stupid reasons are - overall - a good thing, as these resulted in my X-Ray.

Has anyone ever died here in Soylent? Kuro5hin has been around long enough that a few people have. Mindpixel and enterfornone committed suicide. trhurler dropped dead of a heart attack while hiking in the woods. I think someone was killed in action in Iraq.

The ER doc said my "cold" was really acute bronchitis. I should have realized that as my sore throat and stuffed-up nose both cleared up but I have quite a severe cough.

In other news, the housing division of the organization that runs my mental health clinic tells me I qualify for housing. I don't know yet how soon that will be. I have the number of the guy that handles the paperwork; I called him a couple days ago, he called back but just left his name and number, now my phone is out of juice. There are no power sockets where I'm hanging right now, but I expect I can rejuvenate my phone by mid-afternoon.