MARCH 19, 2026 – My wife suffers from chronic insomnia. I hear about it in the morning, because once my head hits the pillow, I myself check out from all my problems, real and imagined, and transition to the wonderland of dreams. But last night was an exception. I was disturbed initially by the minor but annoying post-cold, post-nasal drip for which none of the OTC post-nasal drip medicines seems to work. My ensuing old-fogey throat clearing triggered a worry session that gave me new empathy for my wife.
Yesterday, several nettlesome matters among my affairs had devolved from “burrs under the saddle” into “icky problems,” a term of art for conundra that must be tackled and resolved but can’t be without substantial unpleasantness. Alternatively, “icky problems” can be defined as “points of anxiety that cause insomnia.” In the context of an insomnia session, a salient feature of an icky problem is its catalytic property: one leads to another.
So, there I found myself at 4:12 a.m., according to my iPhone, wrestling with half a dozen icky problems. The main consolidated irritation was that the more I tried to set these problems aside, the more distorted they became until they masqueraded as full-blown crises. Moreover, their catalytic nature sent my mind on a rogue mission to identify or fabricate additional problems, “icky” and otherwise.
I’ll describe an example of this roguish effect. As I lay quietly trying to get back to . . . SLEEP, for crying out loud . . . my mind wandered from the strictly icky problems, but then sounding inside my ear was the Dvořák piece I’d mentioned in yesterday’s post. It sounded fine except the tempo changed erratically, like a vintage Škoda with a faulty transmission causing the car to lurch forward way too fast, then pull back so much it risked being rear-ended.
At this juncture, I was irritated—mostly by the icky problems that had sustained my insomnia. Or was it the post-nasal drip that had awakened me in the first place? Before I knew it, a debate over this developed inside my thoughts. Now a regular circus took shape—in one ring, icky problems; in another, non-icky problems precipitated by the icky ones; in a third ring, Dvořák sounding off at varying tempos; then among the popcorn and peanut hawkers, a raging argument as to what was to blame for my seat at the circus. The weight of my predicament eventually led to another worry: by losing nearly an hour of sleep—my iPhone now showed 5:03—what kind of shape would I be in on the morrow as I confronted the icky problems?
One more thing to worry about and keep me awake.
As the morning unfolded after daybreak, however, what I realized was that icky problems are infinitely ickier at four in the morning when you’re lying in bed with your eyes closed than they are in broad daylight when you’re sitting or standing with decent posture. Soon after breakfast I tackled the icky problems, which soon lost their “ickiness.” They didn’t dissipate altogether, but they’d moderated in parallel fashion to my dreams just before the post-nasal drip had awakened me: In the first dream a huge boisterous German shepherd pounced on me but without doing any harm; in the very next dream sequence appeared a folk singer with a lovely voice singing a cappella, though she carried an iridescent acoustic guitar.
Clairvoyant dream symbolism at its best. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there’s definitely something going on in my dreams.
After deflating my icky problems, the rest of my insomniac session worries followed suit. At 10:30 I grabbed my skis and headed for “Little Switzerland.”
Already the mercury had climbed into the mid-40s F. Just a day away from the vernal equinox, our sun was bursting with cheer in a deep blue sky. Our star’s happy countenance turned the fast-melting snows of St. Moritz into a potential face burner, but in defense I was well-covered with apparel and sunscreen.
Skin cancer was on my mind. Two days ago I’d had my semi-annual derm check and escaped relatively unscathed except for a small red dot that was or was not “squeamish cell” sounding . . . I forget, or rather, I didn’t really catch it in the first place . . . on the outer side of the bicep and tricep of my left arm.
“I don’t think there’s anything there,” said my long-time dermatologist, aptly named, Dr. Goodman, “but we’ll have it biopsied just to make sure. If there are any cancer cells, we can simply go a little deeper, and we can do that here in the clinic.”
“Hey, sign me up!” I said. “After what I’ve been through with the multiple myeloma, what’s a little skin cancer on my upper arm?”
The good medicine man, who knows me well, rewarded me with a laugh. A classically trained pianist and performance major as an undergraduate, and married to a professional bassoonist, my derm doc is always eager to talk music at my appointments. These conversations serve as a welcome distraction from the medical purpose of the visits.
As it turned out, the biopsy did reveal a barely detectable sign of “squeamish” cells, as Dr. Goodman revealed to me in a call late yesterday. My arm will require a follow-up encounter with the scalpel. I pondered this today while facing the sunrays bouncing off the snows of St. Moritz.
In this regard, I recalled a sun-n-snow encounter in my youth. It occurred toward the end of the year I spent at Sterling School in Vermont, which year was replete with record snowfalls. For us skiers (the entire student body, it seemed, except for the hockey team), the ski season ran from Thanksgiving Day to Memorial Day. Both of those days and many between were spent at Stowe, about a 45-minute drive from campus. We skied in all sorts of wily conditions, but the Memorial Day outing was on a beautiful day filled with sunshine—too much sunshine, as it turned out. None of us thought of applying sunscreen. All of us, however, thought of skiing with reckless abandon from our arrival at around 9:00 to closing time at 4:00.
Upon boarding the bus we realized that everyone was sporting a severely sunburned face. When we returned to school, I made a pit stop in our dorm’s communal bathroom at the end of the hallway. When I peered into the wide mirror on the wall behind the row of sinks. I couldn’t believe what I saw: My face was as red as a fire engine. Other Sterling skiers crowded at the mirror to see their “fire engine faces.”
“Holy Jesus!” someone said. I can’t say for sure, but it might’ve been Bill Salmen, the ace of the downhill ski team. It was something he would’ve said, as he saw his face on fire.
Decades later I paid the price with several Mohs surgeries. I’ve since protected my face assiduously from the sun. Today, in addition to the level 50-sunscreen, I wore a buff pulled up over the top of my head, plus a good hiking cap with a serious visor under my Swedish x-c ski cap. My get-up allowed minimal infiltration of UV rays but possible misidentification as an ICE agent.
I did my usual five full-length cycles up and down the face of “St. Moritz,” then with shorter cycles, I collected another 200 feet of vertical feet. With all cares tossed into the blue yonder, I had a blast pretending that I really was in the Swiss Alps and way above the timberline, at that. Plus, the sleep deficit caused by my “icky problem” insomnia last night . . . well, there wasn’t any deficit. I could’ve stayed on the mountain all day long, but even with all my precautions, I didn’t want to push my luck. I didn’t want to risk another fire-engine-red face, which would qualify as a supremely icky problem. One fire-engine-red face at age 14 was enough for a lifetime.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
