I’ve come around to accepting that no good writing happens after 10PM. 9 even. I keep winding up writing these things later and later into the evening and finding out through these trials that I cannot do it. I cannot write with any real zeal or sense of lasting cohesion after a certain hour. I break down. Stress has me breaking down earlier and starting later, which is to say that the window for performance is shrinking. Today, for example, I spent a few hours working on paperwork and that totally wiped me out. I was done. So, what ended up happening was entirely nothing until this.
This is not great, obviously, but it is the result of needing to hit that release valve hard after a day that was hard in a long string of tough days. It wears on the body and the soul.