insomnia

I've been battling this beast for many years, mostly as the result of a longtime prescription given to me by a doctor who should have known better. Whatever beneficial effects it had for me also seemed to have turned off for a long time the switch in my brain to indicate sleep. At one point, it was five days without a wink: in New York City. We were staying with a friend in a 1.5-room fifth floor walkup on Madison and 82nd in mid-February. The apartment had no real walls so I couldn't really get any privacy even to read, and it was too cold to walk to Washington Square and back, and I'd have felt perfectly safe doing so. But dying of hypothermia is one of my few fears (death itself is not one of them), and I didn't really want to risk it. And I was kinda lazy. But it was the kind of wakefulness like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockword Orange with revulsion therapy. My eyes seemed propped open.

A good thing is that, over time, I've learned or trained myself not to ruminate. I don't lie awake thinking about the mess I've made of my life, or why I didn't ever allow myself to learn to waterski, or what bills remain unpaid, or the debts I owe to an alphabet soup of governmental agencies and financial institutions. I lay mostly in silence, although in the last year I've added Nichiren Buddhist chanting to the mix. Music, darkness, heavy food intake don't help. Nam Yoho Rengo Kyo has passed a lot of hours.

I just went to Sheetz for a footlong meatball sandwich, at 4am, hoping some gut loading would do the trick. Occasionally it does, but tonight I'm not so sure. Antihistamines, even industrial amounts of prescription medications don't often help much.

Side note: one of my readers once inquired where you get a meatball hero at 4 a.m. I explained that when you live within 2 miles of a decent interstate exchange anywhere in the South, you can get just about anything you please. Don't even get me started on Buc-ees, the closest of which is about 240 miles NW of here. As the billboard says, "If you know, you know."

The reports say that insomniacs underestimate the amount they sleep, and that's probably true. But most of my nights, to the extent I sleep at all, it's never a deep sleep, and the only reason I know I've been asleep is that I'll remember fragments of a dream. But still wake up tired. And if I feel like I've only gotten 1.5 hours of sleep and it's really 2.5, well, that ain't helping.

And once 6am hits, forget it, and it's getting perilously close to that now. My options are to take another pill, hope it helps, and maybe my mascot won't wake me too much to cater to her every need. They don't call it "hounding" for nothing.

Used to be, in my younger days, I'd just stay awake all night working. Don't even care to do that anymore, and unfortunately or not, I don't have the four-foot-high stacks of paper to plow through that I used to. They provided some sense of security, anxiety, and something to do all the same time. 

And everyone else whose name is Land, at least those I'll lay claim to, sleeps like a charm. Mi esposa can get her eight hours in, and then a few more during the day, maybe a few times a day. This isn't necessarily a good thing at all, given the overall picture, but it does make for some jealously on my part. And there's nothing like watching a basset sleep. Completely given in to pure bliss.

I used to tell a friend that sleep was the highest one could get, which perhaps explains my pursuit of it.  His question, a reasonable one: If you're asleep how would you know? But one fascinating experience with lucid dreaming a few weeks ago convinced me that, in the right moment, sleep could be quite damn exhilarating.

I also used to say that my lack of sleep make up for my excess of it between the ages of 16 and 25. But that karma's been paid back, in spades, many years ago.

I'd love to check into a sleep clinic and just stare at the monitoring people for eight hours.

And I've asked my doctor, whatever happened to sedatives or barbiturates? I guess those are just for the hospitalized these days. I've wished for such action before, with horrid results. But now that I need them, insurance do not allow for it (credit to S. Q. Liquor). 

Anyway, time to determine the next step. I do have a relatively quick book on crosses to get through, and if it wasn't accompanied by one of the most twisted style guides I've ever received, the job might even be easy.

A basic rule: Whenever clients say a project should be easy, most of the time they are lying, I hope unintentionally.

Signing off, if not exactly out.