Torn

Noteworthy that I'm back to a 3:11 AM wakening. This is in spite of sleeping pills that I started taking since I can't live some awesome artist's life where waking up at 3 AM means I Need to Paint Something or A Song Must Be Written or There is Poetry in My Soul. Or whatever.

Waking up at 3 AM means going to work on 4 hours of sleep, looking malnourished and puffy at the same time. Half of my mission on this rock is style. Mother fuck if I won't do everything in my power to pull that off.

I'll get back to the sleeping pills, but I started this out wanting to admit to you that I'm torn between talking about what's happening to our coasts and people right now and doing what I normally do in this space. A fiddle dee dee to real life. As in: damn this world's poverty, I will take its curtains and make me a gown for the party.

But I've answered my question by starting a tangent that I have to finish about my fucked up sleeping patterns and the medications that have not worked on it so far. I'm afraid that I may find my self being selfish until the last of my days on this earth.



And so. I shall commence sewing.

A while ago my doctor wrote me a prescription for Ambien to help me sleep. And the first week I took it. Wow. It was the best sleep I'd had in ages and I was stoked. When the weekend came I got back to feeling fully rested again. I felt positively spoiled on my 9 hours of sleep every night.

At the same time, I was doing research about Ambien and finding that an alarming number of people were doing shit in their sleep and not knowing it. Blessing and curse to live alone, you see, because I have no one to accidentally fuck but also no one to tell me that I shouldn't make casseroles or drive my car at 2 in the morning in my sleep.

I solved this with a barricade of pillows that would at least alert me the next day if I did get out of bed. And actually felt better about my disorganized life cause I can barely find my car keys and a measuring cup when I'm wide awake, in this motherfucker. Doing that shit in my sleep would require a superhuman desire to sleep cook, or sleep drive, or sleep fuck (which would probably require sleep driving AND sleep shaving to actually happen).



Then one night it just stopped working. Waking up again at 3 AM but still feeling drowsy and drugged, and it fucking sucked. So I did what any conscientious American would do. I upped my dose by fifty percent without consulting a licensed physician. And phew. Back to normal. But possibly a bit more prone to frying chicken and dreaming at the same time. No sweat dudes. Could be worse.

When I talked to my doctor again she was like "oh hell no" and insisted I take something else because I was taking way too much Ambien. Since I'd also read that it's incredibly habit forming I was fine with that. I also asked that she not prescribe me some shit that had science fiction side effects, please.

Trazodone. It's actually an anti-depressant but when it's taken you immediately feel the strangest kind of drowsy ever. Lots of REM sleep, on this one. And crazy wild dreams like the ones I told you about earlier. She prescribed me horse pills of it, so the first night I took it I woke up feeling puffy and unrested even though I'd slept like 10 hours. Oops. I only take halvsies now, and they seem to work just fine.

Until now. Well. Until 2 days ago. Now I'm back at the 3 AMing, no end in sight.



Is God telling me that I need to leave my 9 to 5 life and pursue something way more hippie-ish? If so, I find myself torn again. Because that life is undoubtedly less filled with awesome impulse purchases like three hundred dollar handbags and large televisions. And even if those things don't matter (and I'm not sure they don't - they are expenditures of energy just like any other stupid human thing we do all fucking day long and I dare someone to tell me their days are somehow more conscientious cause they aren't concerned with that shit, I'd have to tell them that they are overlooking the fact that their loftier seeming actions are actually just a different version of the hamster wheel. I mean. Unless they are climbing mountains and living off the land for days at a time so that they can go save starving orphans by hand? They are masturbating just like everyone else is. It's what we do. Monkeys in a cage.) I need to take into account that there is far less sass and measurable progress if I decide to leave it all behind and wear birkenstocks and paint vaginas all day, or whatever. (and ummm, why doesn't blogger know that "vaginas" is a fucking word? really, blogger? really? yes, there are times when you have to use the plural for that one.) (also I have decided that the dude/lady that saves orphans is masturbating as well, just maybe the tantric version)

Okay that last paragraph is a mess. But it is pure.

Here are the high level takeaways of this post:

- I am selfish. Like. Hella selfish. I have the capacity to give and give and give to a person who is near me and I love to do it. But when it comes to writing I don't want to be concerned with how people are dying and the world is ending, and I can literally forget that those things are happening long enough to talk about handbags.

- I can't sleep. I have tried 4 medications (including over the counter benadryl type shit) to cure this and nothing seems to work for any span of time.

- I think that maybe my inability to sleep hints at my needing to pursue a different lifestyle with a different sleeping and waking cycle.

- I can't think of a single high-paying job aside from rock star, gangster's moll or trophy wife that would allow for this schedule and support my desire to have new stuff as much as possible. And I like stuff, so a different lifestyle seems pretty unlikely.

- Fiddle dee dee