INSOMNIA

“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.” Friedrich Nietzsche

America has become the State of Insomnia.

Do you know anybody who is getting a full night’s sleep?

As I’m writing you it’s quarter after hell o’clock in the morning - 3:16 - and I’m strung out on the blackness. I mean staring out at the blackness, finding more succor there than in the light. Lately, a dog’s been howling through the night, either keening for some lost happiness or howling in anguish over current agony. Impossible to tell. I’ve walked out, in the dark, to find the source of the howling, and have been met with the same kind of spooky, voidy mystery I imagined when I read Hound of the Baskervilles as an unhinged eleven-year-old.

*

What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?

I give.

Someone who stays up all night torturing himself over whether or not there’s a dog.
--- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

*

If, as legendary insomniac E.M. Cioran wrote in The Trouble With Being Born, consciousness is an open wound, then the horror of not being able to sleep – to essentially not being able to turn off your mind – pretty much amounts to bleeding out. That open wound, into and out of which spill worries, dreams, regrets and (I’ve heard rumors) the odd happy memory, exposes you to the grim possibility of psycho-emotional sepsis. At which point, it brings me no pleasure to report, the brain can actually begin to smell. The fetid stink of rotten thoughts wafting out of your ears, your nostrils or – wait! Could what we sometimes refer to as halitosis, in actuality, consist of rotting thoughts?

One more thing to worry about. Fantastic!

(Old Cioran, a truly festive Romanian, also wrote: “Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.” So there’s that.)

Is anybody not stressed, besides the tainted tech gliterrati, those titans of industry attending the non-stop soirees of President Goldfinger? Speaking of, it’s nice to imagine Jeff Bezos gazing down, like the Greek gods of old, at the hoi polloi beneath him, as he guts a newspaper or guzzles some nearly extinct three-toed sloth milk. (Is it the near-extinction that makes it tasty, the knowing that this is the last mom-juice this three-toed little lady is going to squirt?

Connoisseurs, I’m told, churn the stuff into something delish for those wealthy and discerning enough to smear it on their Wonder bread. And yes, Wonder’s back, side effect of the spillover from Trad Wife to Trad Nutrition. Witness RFK’s hearty embrace of steak-steak-steak. “Meat good!” you can imagine Bobby burbling, dressed in his round-the-house bearskin toga and bunny-head slippers. If you can’t kill it, you can’t taste it, according to purists. “Just chop off its head, wipe its ass and stick it on a plate,” I remember Larry Flynt declaring to a thoroughly disgusted waiter in Century City. This was the same dinner where his Number Two complained that the gazpacho was cold. You get the picture. Sophisticates! You know, the way money makes you sophisticated. (If, say, you’ve got enough paper to Guilfoyle or Noem your God-given face, then you’ve got enough to eat fresh-wiped cow….) But never mind.

Does our friend Bezos ever have trouble sleeping? Do his wife’s endlessly flaunted and professionally, some say grotesquely, enlarged breasts make it easier to rest his bulb-like head? And yes, I do find myself wondering what these industrial-sized appurtenances will look like when she’s 80. Will she need a home care worker to help haul them around the senior care facility? In which case, I suppose, this would make her a job provider. So hats off!

These, for what it’s worth, are the kind of thoughts that intrude in the wee hours. As Charlotte Bronte liked to say, “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.” But not, of course, if the pillows are filled with silicone. And why not? Cosmetic surgeons have to pay for their yachts too.

But hey, I’m not going to lie. Over the years I’ve tried everything, legal and illegal, to knock myself out. The trouble was, you don’t wake up from the shit that knocks you out – you come to. And if you don’t know the difference, congratulations. After you die please pick up your participation trophy at the door.

*

“I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.” Emile Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

*

In the bad old days, of course, night was like some secret back room in the after-hours club of day. Worse, I have to admit, was morning. Can we talk about that special feeling of driving home – or off to cop – at 8:15, while most normal folk were on their way to work? You’d peek over the wheel at them, with smug superiority, as you lived your glamorous life of cadging twenty bucks from your girlfriend’s purse (or selling her clothes) for a bag while everyone else was trying to make a living and support their families. The creeped-out look on other drivers’ faces when they eyeballed your molting face in the hoopty beside them at a redlight at 8 AM — how did they know?(Cue Don Delillo quote: “The special grotesquerie of sane men leading normal lives.”)

But where were we? Insomnia, right… And no, I’m not talking about the Nordic-esque noir Christopher Nolan vehicle, Insomnia, with Al Pacino as a displaced LA cop and Robin Williams a wildly unconvincing and oddly Mister Rogers-like killer in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Never mind. How long have I been writing this? Where am I? I’m so tired I’m beyond tired. Tired is five flights up. Stop complaining, fucko, you’re boring people. Why can’t Pam Bondi get out of my head? Why won’t she apologize to Epstein victims? The clock is ticking. Sleep is a boat I keep falling out of. Does Pam wonder what happened to her life? Or does she get off being a presidential power bottom? The eternal question.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, an alcoholic insomniac (bad combo) famously wrote, “In the dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning.” The original phrase “dark night of the soul” was coined by the Spanish 16^th Century Mystic and poet Saint John of the Cross. (His first miracle, if you’re wondering, was falling into a lagoon and being rescued by a beautiful woman who turned out to be The Virgin Mary. His second? Falling into a well and being rescued by a beautiful woman who turned out to be – what are the odds? – the Virgin Mary. His third, in 1705, occurred when he was praying in front of a painting of Jesus and Jesus spoke to him. (Hopefully, Jesus suggested he start wearing a life jacket.) Anyway, for my money, three in the afternoon is much more disturbing than three AM. If you’re feeling lost, doomed and hopeless in the middle of the afternoon, you’re seriously fucked. The trick is to take a nap and keep your head out of the oven. But that’s me.

*

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world. Leonard Cohen

*

Certain thoughts, I’m not going to lie, only scooch to the surface during sleeplessness. Like, say, this cosmic poser, first posited by the legendary ethno-botanist and DMT enthusiast Terrence McKenna: “What if what we call reality is no more than a shared delusion?” Anybody? What if reality is no more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination? Do we still have to go to the DMV?

But it gets worse. At the other end of the Uh-Oh Spectrum from cosmic agita we come to the mundane. Thoughts that intrude unbidden. Consider these, selected from an informal survey of friends and acquaintances, a rando smattering of insomniacal faves. Enjoy!

One: What if the woman I’m with is faking it? What if every woman you’ve ever been with was faking it? Let’s get paranoid together, shall we? What if, behind your back, every human you’ve ever had sex with has been smirking whilst you lumber off the bed and pad sweatily to the bathroom for a post-coital pee? (That’s right, I went with whilst. I’m a writer.)

Two: A woman I know (my wife) can’t stop remembering the feel of flying backwards, at five, when her mother threw her across the room for “mouthing off.” No matter where she is, what she’s doing, on some sub-rosa level she is reliving the violence, the buried terror that got her a pre-school concussion, still smarting from the way the doctors looked at her, the bottomless pity, the judgment that morphs to self-judgment and infects the rest of a life… (Did she become a drug addict? Guess!)

Three: A Catholic friend – or ex-Catholic – who by day stands out as the sanest guy I know, tells me, when he can’t sleep, he feels - or re-feels - the priest’s clammy hand when he slid it into his corduroys – always for some reason corduroys – beneath the elastic of his tighty-whiteys, when he was an altar boy in 1986. (Sometimes the cliches are true; that’s how they get to be cliches.) When this happens, my pal tells me, he has to bolt out of bed, splash water on his face, spray some fucking Febreze or light a pinon stick to cancel the wafting memory of the monster celibate’s cologne. English Leather.

Four: Finally - sometimes it’s just voices. Like, just to pick one, the drunken Boomer Dad: “You know why you’ve got that nub of nose? Because your groupie lush of a mother fucked the bass player from Iron Butterfly…. ” (In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Baby!) Worst of all, of course, is when it’s your own voice: “I’m going to die…” “I’ve wasted my life… ” “I should have stuck with puppetry…” All the verses in the chorus of tormented souls.

*

The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

*

The first song I ever memorized, as a tyke, was the jingle for Sominex, an OTC sleeping pill. Some mothers sang their children nursery rhymes at bedtime. Mine, God bless her, preferred commercial jingles. (I’m including the link here - www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYtDAnanC_g - if you want to hear the lovely little tune.)

“Take Sominex tonight and sleep/Safe and restful, Sleep… Sleep… Sleep.

It’s all I can do not to curl up and nod off just thinking about it.

Side-note: the Sominex spokes-character, a tiny brown fellow, feels more than a tad racist. (This was 1960.) On the other hand, nothing says sleep like a three-fingered little dude in diaper and turban. It’s as if Gandhi himself were there to drug you. In a good way.

But forget the personal, how about the global? Consider this cheery headline from the Guardian:

“POINT OF NO RETURN! Scientists say a hellish ‘Hothouse Earth’ getting closer. At just a few degrees change, continued global heating could set an irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points… Economy and society will cease to function as we know it - but most people unaware!, ‘At 3-4C,’ scientists said last week, ‘a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery.’

Fuck! I have no idea how much “3-4C” actually is, but no matter. It’s enough. Of course, the EPA’s been gutted like a roadkill bear by Donald Trump and its new chairman, former Port Authority lawyer and greenhouse gas enthusiast Lee Zeldin. At this point, for all intents and purposes, the agency no longer exists. Or, more accurately, it exists to declare that it no longer exists... As in, no earth-preserving action will be initiated, and any ongoing programs will immediately cease. To which I say, Thank you Jesus! We can all relax. Pretty soon, if we ever do get to sleep, chances are good we won’t have to worry about waking up. We’ll all be fried.