Sleep is the brother of death.

The Evacuee has often spoken of the mysteries of Thanatos. Her last post, which found the Evacuee "dead on her feet" after a visit to the cemetery, brought to mind this passage from Adam Phillips (in which Phillips is reflecting, as always, on Freud):

Life is a tension which seeks to extinguish itself, to 'cancel itself out'. The first instict arises, paradoxically, to rid itself of the instinct. Something sufficiently vague -- 'a force of whose nature we can form no conception' stirred up some life; and the first response of this new life was to return to its origins, to inanimate matter. . . . There is something unbearable about life -- and perhaps by (Freud's) implication, consciousness -- some 'tension' that only death can release us from. . . . Every living creature, Freud speculates, is hungry, indeed ravenous, for death. But -- and this is where the plot thickens, no for any old death. If what Freud calls 'living substance' is prepared to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death, then it is not any old death it is after. 'We have no longer to reckon,' Freud writes, 'with the organism's puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion' (my italics). There is a death, as it were, that is integral to, of a piece with, one's life: a self-fashioned, self-created death.

Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms p. 76-77.

And what, we ask, is the Thirty Day Bus Pass, if not a series of "ever more complicated detours"?

And on that note, Mission Control transmits our wishes to all for a restful Memorial Day Weekend.