Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

This is all you fucking do. These shitty little comments that are supposed to look like irony, but are empty and mindless.

What’s the deal? Why have you put in that much time on lemmy making essentially the same comment over and over again? Like, often enough that I don’t even have to look at the user name when there’s a comment like this, it’s going to be you.

There has to be a reason behind it, some kind of thing in your head that makes you think it’s a beneficial hobby, so what is it? Help a motherfucker out, I don’t like blocking people unless there’s no other choice, so show me the human behind the blathering.

Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)

Break the shaft in half, now you have two spears.

Only one problem with this.

A spear is superior to a gladius any day. I will fight on that hill. And win, because I have a spear, obviously.

Ikr?

I’d be impressed as hell, and at least salute them as I died from my severed arm bleeding me out

Oh damn! Wet leg and tiny desk! This is gonna be great :)

Thank you for sharing

Edit, after having watched it then scrolled all the way through lemmy. It was great! If you’ve never seen or heard wet leg, this is a solid point to get introduced to them. Their unique sound is well showcased here.

If you’re an established fan, they were on point, and obviously excited to be doing that kind of performance, so the energy is really high and satisfying.

Belly rubs, stat!

I see a belly like that and I just want to pet it

My chaps are large, thick, and pendulous too

Are we talking about the iris again?

Critique and analysis of a study or experiment is the default. It isn’t a religion; science thrives on repeat analysis.

Snanussy

Lemmy is neither private nor secure. Assume anything here can be seen by anyone in the world.

Which isn’t some dire thing, it’s just part of the decision making process

I’d take it!

Not too bad.

But I was fucking around while trying to learn to ride a bike. Went too fast, hit a bump on a dirt road. Went over the handlebars, slid face first a few feet into a ditch.

Now, like I said, I wasn’t badly injured. It was all just scrapes and bruises. But they were deep scrapes from my forehead all the way down one side of my face, then my chest and belly, plus along the inner side of my right arm from trying to stop myself.

Every scrape was filled with dirt and gravel, which had to be picked out. Then it all needed flushing out. So by the time it was all done I was high from endorphins and crying and screaming, looked like a shredder had beaten the shit out of me, and was both throbbing and burning along the entire scraped section.

Then I had to go to school like that lol.

Gotta be possum. That shit is musky

Msr Renard looking fine

I dunno, Beatles in either the white album or Sgt pepper era would be amazing.

Specific performance, the nirvana mtv unplugged might be a better option.

Then again, there’s a dozen performances at Woodstock that were nuts. Hendrix at that show? Fuck me, that’s a peak music experience.

I dunno man, this one is hard.

Fuck! Robert Johnson! Any performance ever. The recordings from back then are not the best possible audio, and you know that man could tear up a room. That’s my final answer.

Leverage, in specific the “redemption” phase.

It’s cheesy as hell most of the time, but it satisfies that escapist itch rather well

I Think you misposted homie. This is the far side community. Mind you, this one has that absurdist vibe the far side often uses, so maybe it was intentional