Sleep comes like a drug
She asks me why I don’t sleep. Or more accurately, she asks me why I don’t get enough sleep. Why I’m perpetually shoddy with short term memory loss. Why I can’t sit through a meeting any longer than 45 minutes before I start to experience a violent loss of control over my eyelids and brief episodes of unconsciousness reminiscent of insulin shock. Why I often forget my keys, even though they’re right where they should be. And why I sometimes don’t notice when she stares at me longingly.
Sleep deprivation kills your sex drive. It’s a proven fact. But that’s not why I don’t sleep.
I don’t sleep because long ago, my mind went somewhere a bit too far over the rainbow. I looked behind the curtain, I climbed the pointy mountain, I overdosed on the pixie dust. I made up something that is best left to chance.
You would be amazed at the things that can be generated in life with focus and intention. Once the ego has been extinguished, nay, mercilessly crushed under the boot of reality, ground into a fine powder and then incinerated in a nuclear furnace, only then does one have the space to make something really nifty.
A life perhaps. One of your own choosing rather than that piecemeal thing that your parents, friends, enemies, lovers, haters, socioeconomic status, skin color, geography of birth, religious upbringing, gender and national origin gave you. That thing looks like something a hundred retarded monkeys might knit out of yarn if you gave them amphetamines and forced them to watch the entire syndicated run of Golden Girls over and over.
That ego not a pretty thing. For some it is a suit of armor that keeps them apart from real human relationships. For others, it is insufficient protection against the elements of life.
But once you torch that sucker, there you stand, bare and naked in your unity. Whole, perfect and complete. Out of that, you can generate anything you want, (if the fear of having no immediate purpose doesn’t drive you insane.)
Most people stop there and just generate a life they want. A better marriage, financial success, raising their kids right, an Oscar for best screenplay.
You have to give the transsexuals one thing. They aren’t content with wearing the quilt that life imposed on them. They make their own identity in a big way.
I generated my life too. Freedom, love, commitment, power, yah yah yah. But there was something missing from that grandiose vision. Something profound. What good is it in generating the life you want if the second you get it, the lavatory on a passing 747 malfunctions, leaking fecal matter out onto the fuselage where it congeals, freezes, breaks away and plummets thousands of feet before penetrating the roof of your mansion like a bunker buster bomb, down through the attic, bedrooms, trophy room, den and gym before crushing you into a soupy mass as you plod away on your aerobic cross trainer?
Nobody wants to meet their end via a glacier of human waste. Especially not the day after you close on your dream home.
So I, being the overachiever that I pretend to be when everyone is looking, went one step further. I generated my death too.
Oh I’m not going to tell you about it. That would spoil the surprise. I know you really want to know. It just isn’t going to happen.
But suffice to say, I when the journey into the great unknown comes, it comes in my sleep.
So when she asks me why I can’t get to bed at a decent time, why the caffeine doesn’t seem to work, why I’m up at this ungodly hour, why I don’t want to turn the television off and just go to sleep, why I yawn at her sexy lingerie, now she will know.
Closing my eyes every night to slip into unconsciousness feels too much like the last time.
And I don’t like it.
11.04