Insomnia

I always promise myself. Next time, I'm not going to just lay in bed waiting to go to sleep, I might as well get up and do something.

Well, this is next time. I'm up, dammit, and I'm pissed about it but it's too late to take a sleeping pill so here I am.

What does insomnia mean to me? Well for one thing it's tied to depression, but it's not as obviously correlated as you might think. It goes like this.

My mind is like a big hungry beast. I picture the Tasmanian Devil, spinning and spinning, taking up all the dust and tumbleweeds and everything in its path, and throwing it back out again in a big messy cloud. The problem comes at night, when I want to shut it all down. It just keeps on spinning, and if it doesn't have anything productive to think about it starts looking for shit.

Like: What an idiot I am. What an idiot I was when I was (12, 15, 24, 32, 38, 42). I'll replay idiot scenarios again and again, sometimes I'll think of what I should have said or done, sometimes just cringe at what I did say or do. If I do that enough nights in a row – Hey, presto! I can depress myself right down!

Or even sometimes I'll just lay there while this thing goes on spinning in my head on completely neutral topics. Who did I like on American Idol? What's the strategy I'd take if I were on Survivor? What would I do if I won the lotto? What do I want to take to Burning Man this year?

I try to distract myself. My best trick is, to start obsessing over something completely boring. That's a hard trick – if it's too boring I move on to something else. If it's too interesting I get too engaged with it. Sometimes I have success with this game: Imagine a series of rooms. For each room, I make up a person, a color, and an activity. Picture the room in the right color, with the person doing the activity. I usually organize this by alphabet. Annie in the aqua room is doing acrostics. Betty in the burgundy room is playing basketball. I have to go back and try to hold all the pictures up to the latest in my mind at once – Betty's basketball has to be moving while Annie fills in the acrostics or it doesn't count. If I can keep it going much past Ellen in the ecru room with her etch-a-sketch, I've got a chance at sleep.

I usually have a theme for the activities – all sports, or games, or something. One time it was all sexually charged activities. That didn't work, I got too involved and made it all the way to Mary in the maroon room masturbating before I had to stop for a wank myself.

Tonight? I dunno. Got off on the wrong foot. Too much TV, I've got a bad cough coming on that keeps me from settling in, something is off. I'm really tired from the gym, I did a really good workout tonight and pushed myself really hard. But I'm just not sleepy. I laid down to sleep and SPROING! Wide awake. Nothing good to worry about. No good stories to tell myself. Just endless brain cycles, spinning spinning spinning.

I'm an idiot.