insomnia

When I can’t sleep, I come to the living room and sit on the couch and drink 2% milk and read William Carlos Williams. Or sometimes Neruda. Or if I want to make things easy on myself, I’ll go with Austen. I allow Colonel Brandon and the Dashwoods to hand me off into night. They tell stories perfect enough for dreams.

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I like to think of all the other people not sleeping and I feel better about myself. I think of Kevin from Kentucky who is up counting postage stamps in his collection. He gets to about 2987 when he looses track and has to start all over again. He organizes them in colors and then hates that so he organizes them by year instead. I think of Carla from China who lays awake making shadow puppet dragons in the dim light, wishing her mother had given her a more Chinese sounding name. She gets up quietly, youtubes the latest Miley Cyrus song and memorizes the dance to show her friends at school. It's that slutty Party in the USA video that's ruining the innocence of all the world. I think of Sam the Space Station astronaut who lays awake not knowing what time it is since it's always black. He looks down at earth and thinks of me, too, and wonders what page I'm on in Sense & Sensibility. He's read it once because his girlfriend, Evelyn from Earth, told him to but he didn't think it was that good.

Sometimes when I can't sleep I think of all the sounds I'm not hearing. The clocks in the living room downstairs. The honk of horns in New York City. The shouts of shortorder cooks at 24 hour diners. The roar of planes flying over the ocean. The thunder of a storm where it is storming, somewhere. I wonder if all those sounds together would be something neat and artsy, like this video a guy made once that my friend e-mailed me. It was a really cool song made from the sound of spoons and pancakes flipping and bacon sizzling. I guess those went together. . horns and clocks and angry chefs might just be a cacophonous headache all forced into one.

Sometimes when I can't sleep I think of each piece grass in the yard. They each must get so angry being seen all together. They just get called "the grass" and not "the grasses"; they aren't individual in the slightest. If I were a blade of grass, I would complain about that with my friends if the yard. I would say "Hey, look here. I stand up on my own! I have my very own root that goes down there into the ground. OK, so I look the same as everyone else, but isn't it what's on the inside that counts? Don't you teach that to your kids? Like we really chose to grow in a group all, well....grouped together. Read Whitman sometime. That dude really got me."

Sometimes when I can't sleep I reread everything I've written in other times when I couldn't sleep. Even if it's in a notebook with other things, I can always pick it out. I always manage to make myself sound more brilliant than I do when I am fully awake and normal. I wonder what the world would see if I was the me I am when I am on the edge of my bed, pen in hand, hair frazzled, glasses astray, rebelling against the doctor's recommend hours of shut-eye. I think I'm slightly more interesting.