Without fail, I have terrible bouts of insomnia whenever a full day of work is ahead of me. Intellectually I know it's the worst thing that can happen, that I should somehow magically will myself to sleep.

But that doesn't help. Next to nothing helps. Sleeping pills do, but I forgot to buy a new set.

So I wile away the hours in a sweat-soaked bed, eyes closed but mind wide awake, switching from various scenes meant to relax me to whatever odd things come up from the depths.

I have accepted recently that I am not at all in a good mental or emotional state. I've passed it off as being an after effect of the cold, then due to the bronchitis and other health situations.

It is deeper than that.

Beyond visceral experiences like dancing, I don't feel much nowadays. I suppose anything beyond escape-related activities has little effect. Thankfully all of those are either healthy or productive. But I am spending less and less time in my own skin. Never did that much to begin with. It isn't as if I feel hopeless, lost pleasure in doing things I normally enjoy, or the other laundry list items of depression.

Granted, there is one subject that for some months now has increasingly taken up mental time. Not related to any one specific person.

I'm neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. Everything is as it should be and more or less how I prefer it. The topiary garden is immaculately well-kept, the atrium vibrant, and the moon deck free from migrating lunatics. But I walk along the halls and corridors, the pathways and stepping stones of well-trod mental places...and something is missing.

No doubt it's something simple, internal, like taking it easy or discovering some secret I long ago locked away from myself in the hopes of not finding it again. I seem to have a lot of those lying around.

The vexing thing is that sometimes I want stagnation. I rarely get to indulge in it. When I do something changes or I change. I had been listening to Moonlight Sonata for lack of having sufficiently dreary Godspeed You Black Emperor. I'd faded into semi-consciousness, started to write this, and all the sudden there was a presence at the door to my bedroom. It was solid in appearance, psychically distinctive. I had no idea what it was. I said to it that regardless of what it was I wanted to be alone right now. It has left me be.

The more accurate statement would be I want to slip into a coma due to severe blood loss. Not for any want of self-injury or thoughts of suicide. That is idiocy. I want some deep, nearly unfathomable loss of cosciousness. Which I suppose is that escape instinct again, but at 4:30 when you KNOW WITH EVERY GODDAMN FIBRE OF YOUR BEING YOU SHOULD BE ASLEEP--such a bias is understandable and expected.

I tried some pain killers to see if they'd be at all effective. Sadly no.

Maybe I do know what's missing. Maybe I know it requires me changing some aspects of myself that I prefer. Giving up a love of tragedy is like kicking alcohol.

No.

You likely have no idea. The texture, the irony. It's really like a drawn out plot twist in its temprament. And somehow I have to just drop it and find some thing else that regularly brings some emotional salience with it.

Surely not a thing. Material objects are useful for getting out mental things into a common experience space, but beyond that they're useless.

Surely not a person. Having my emotional and mental well-being largely tied to the whims or changes or inexplicable chimeras of another human-being is madness. Not even love affords any kind of stability from the fickle character of modern people. I am as guilty of this as most anyone, perhaps moreso considering how much I can detest weakness when I'm not in the mood to otherwise correct or ameliorate it.

As much as it utterly and deeply pains me not to, no, that's not an option.

So then all that's left is either hobby pursuits or a career. I have lived to only work before, and that is a cold, metal place I do not ever wish to return to.

By process of elimination, then, it's either typing out words to otherwise forget about myself and invest in either narrative structure or character interaction...or to guide myself by instinct to this or that given shot and lose myself in the process. Or dancing my ass clean off.

So it seems, then, that indirect self-experience with a borderline escapist element is what is most suitable.

How reasonable. And how utterly goddamn unconvincing.

.

(And like any person drunk off of no sleep, just leave me be so far as the above goes. I just wanted to write about it to get it out of my head.)

previous - next