Some sort of muddled monologue about insomnia, writing and politics

[Cain]

The words come harder, now.  Its nearly 2am.  I am as wide awake as ever, and on my bed, typing this into a word processor on my slowly, yet steadily dying laptop.

Some people consider insomnia a blessing.  Those people are, of course, not those who suffer from it.  "But you can get so much more done, with all that spare time!"  It doesn't work like that.  I need sleep as much as anyone else.  Well, perhaps a slight exaggeration.  I have...trained myself, through years of lack, to get by on as little as possible.  At first, I could barely do more than 24 hours without feeling like curling up in a ball somewhere, and dying.

But I got better, as they say.  I had no choice, it was either learn how to deal with it, or not.  Sure, I probably could have gotten drugs to send me off...but that's cheating.  Its not real sleep, you don't feel the same for it.  And I abhor certain aspects of our overly medicated culture anyway.  Taking a pill doesn't cure you, it just helps you cope with some of the symptoms, as well as ensuring a steady supply of income for one pharma giant or another.  There is, of course, no real incentive to find a cure.  Why bother, when you can treat merely the symptoms that arise from the condition?  Far more profitable. 

Ahem, excuse the diversion.  That is one of the many problems that arises from lack of sleep.  Concentration slips.  Thoughts wander, meander, and eventually become incoherent.  Eyes become tired and red, eventually unable to bear reading or watching a television screen.  Mental blank spots are next, actually blacking out, and forgetting things.  Headaches, or something similar enough, is usually the next step, where it becomes painful to do anything that requires further thought or mental discipline.  You start to cycle.  For a little while you feel better - practically normal - then you crash into a gibbering wreck. 

And no matter how much you want it, you just can't get to sleep.  Nothing comes.  The bed is too uncomfortable.  Hot, cold, turn the pillow over and count sheep.  It never does work.  Only at certain periods, of near exhaustion, where you can feel yourself mentally able to fall asleep...those are the only chances you get.  They are like windows.  They don't always come at the same times, or at all.  You can fight them, with difficulty, but if you do then you don't know when the next one will be along.  But those are the times you can drift off, and finally recover.

My girlfriend, she understands.  Better and worse than understands, she suffers from the same problem, though not to quite the same degree, not yet at least.  University no doubt accelerated my problems, and they will hers, as well.  I have tried to show her, certain tricks I have learnt which have helped me cope...but we spend too much time apart.  She lives half her life in London, by necessity.  Concerts one day, photoshoots the next, exams the day after next.  Maybe that will get better in summer, but I don't know.  The search for work is stressful, and often involves running around after other people, and that will take time, perhaps a lot of it.  No more shoots after this month, and none of them have paid well enough for another year of study, not yet.  She doesn't deserve it.  Her musical talents need the best training money can buy, if they're ever to reach their full potential.  Still, at least I have someone to talk to, during the long nights.

This wasn't even meant to be about insomnia, you know?  No, it was to be about writing.  I like writing.  I enjoy it.  There is a craft to it (which I pay far too little attention to).  The use of words, structure, allusion and metaphor, to create the intended effect in the reader.  Like carefully crafted slices of life and thought, made with particular designs and intent.  How to code and parse meaning, so that it can be understood and reinterpretated by others.

But of late, anything but the least creative aspects of the skill have escaped me.  I can still write in a suitable manner for an academic, that is how I did my thesis.  Dry, precise, highly and almost ritually structured.  You could almost make a program capable of doing it, with the correct inputs.  Or, offhand comments on the news.  That is hardly difficult.  Even the trained monkeys of the blogosphere can do that, several times a day if necessary.

But sustained thought, calculated rage, devious intent...those things, which I could pour into a text, weave a pattern of words to do with as I wanted...those things do not come easily now.  Perhaps it is from working inside a circle of relative comfort.  My presence on certain websites has considerably reduced, in the last year.  I visit maybe ten with regularity, if we include torrent sites and email servers.  I'm a known quantity on those sites, my general stance and feelings on so many things, are known.  As often are my reasons.  I don't need to justify myself, or explain so much. 

My real life circles have been impoverished, too.  I can't blame people though, for moving away from this shithole.  I would too, if I could afford it.  There is nothing to be gained from staying here.  A suburban sprawl, an enclosed and nationally segregated ghetto, and a small commercial and industrial strip.  Woo hoo.  Even our politicians are too pathetically small minded to have anything approaching ambition.  That is a feeling absent to this place.  Repeat the company line.  Go through the motions.  Spend your weekends in a druken haze, vainly attempting to stick your dick in whichever piece of jailbait was allowed through into the only nightclub this place has, then go back to work on Monday and repeat the process, perhaps telling people what horrible things you'd do to whatever pedophile public enemy is being listed in today's tabloid, while never realizing the hypocritical irony.  That's ambition, around here.  Just doing enough not to die in a gutter.

So yes, people left.  Good for them.  But it leaves me here, cut off.  The isolation, physical, mental and emotional, reminds you how small a player you are, in a large world.  And for many of the "players" around here, that is fine.  They don't even realize how big the pond really is.  They cannot comprehend it, literally in some cases.

But me, ah...I walked in the company of spies and generals.  I stalked the corridors of power like a phantom, tracing the footsteps of warlords, manouveres of insurgent leaders and the profit investments of the black market.  I was a tool and pawn, of course.  That's the only way you ever get invited to play.  But once on the inside....ah, its electrifying.  I had to think on every level, from the local to the global, and each stage inbetween.  There was little difference from coming up with ideas for cutting off that jerk from the radicalization study at the knees, and coming up with strategies to deal with a rising China.  And in my spare time, I played chess with people who thought they were playing checkers.  Party politics are fun, when your alleigance is not to the ideology, to the status quo or even to yourself.  I played by a rulebook I alone had read, and the strategy was "maximize disorder, and see what happens next".  Naturally, I sought to benefit in some cases.  I am not a complete idiot.  But just as often, I worked against myself, just so people wouldn't guess, or because the possible outcome I had forseen amused me.  Man exists, insofar as he is opposed.  And I was opposed intellectually, politically, strategically, romantically and personally. 

Here though...there is nothing.  And only nothing will come from nothing.  I set myself challenges, both physical and mental which are too easy to beat, because I know my own strengths and abhor impossible challenges.  There is no interchange, nothing to come up against, nothing to beat, or trick, or steal from, or crush.  The only problems are the ones I can conjure up, and so know the solutions to.  There only is...forever.  I am reduced so much, reduced to the sidelines, until even the amusement of popcorn and jeering at the inevitable losers in such competitions wore thin.  I have since mostly abandoned even those haunts, reminded too much of the pain of lack of access.

And all this does, is reinforce that I simply am.  There is nothing more to me than another spectator, eagerly devouring the nonsense served up, pretending it is all by my own choice, pretending my opinion continues to have validity.  It doesn't, once you are out of the game.  I know, having observed it from the inside.  Bread and circuses....let the chatterers chatter, so long as they do just that, and don't start grabbing at bricks and rocks.  Reduce everything to a team game, and let people think they have a vested interest in whichever team they like more, and reduce even matters of life and death to a gameshow. 

So words and opinions cease to matter.  I used to matter, in a small way.  I can taste the pain, when I try to formulate something, as I go back and delete the writing as I try to express it.  This file has itself lived and died several times.  It is a terrible thing, to be confronted with your own insigificance.  Cut off from a network of words and ideas and power and influence, the words are harder to find.  And they matter less and less. 

[Cramulus]

good read

[Murmur]

Very nice... the only reason I'm not an insomniac anymore is because of all my meds.  I don't fall asleep, I just pass out.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That was very... personal. It made me kind of uncomfortable because of how closely it resembles some internal dialogues I've had. My insomnia comes and goes. When it's on, it's on hard until I become insane, and then it goes away and I fall asleep at 10:30 every night and sleep until 7:30. Man, those are good times!

[Triple Zero]

Thanks for sharing this, Cain. Not because I enjoy reading about your sorrows, but for letting us peek into your head a littlebit.

[Corvidia]

I see I'm hardly the only insomniac. Last night was pretty damn bad. Yay 3am nights.

Good read, and for someone who laments his lack of ability to write recently, you certainly got the bitter across.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Meds.  No shit.

[Corvidia]

Meds.  No shit.

On them. Still have lovely nights of no sleep.

[Sepia]

This is fucking good writing.

[Thurnez Isa]

Meds.  No shit.

On them. Still have lovely nights of no sleep.

plus if you take them for a couple nights in a row I find they really upset your stomach... kind of like feeling like your going to barf but you just can't

[fomenter]

cain i liked the writing good stuff

insomnia sucks, i hated the kind of sleep i got, and the drugged up feeling that the pills they gave me, left me with in the morning  
my insomnia was caused by stress, caffeine abuse and night shift hours, i got over it before i got put on the ambien caliber pills  but it is definitely no fun...

[Corvidia]

Mine's rooted in other problems, which I'm also medicated for. Sometimes it get really bad--two or three days with little to no sleep. <--pills don't help that.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Insomnia sucks - I'll vouch for that.

Man exists, insofar as he is opposed.

Ironically the impression I get from reading this rant is you don't seem to realise you are under direct opposition of the most heinous kind.

Your own brain is against you right now - kick that fucker into touch!

[Jenne]

[LMNO]

Insomnia sucks - I'll vouch for that.

Man exists, insofar as he is opposed.

Ironically the impression I get from reading this rant is you don't seem to realise you are under direct opposition of the most heinous kind.

Your own brain is against you right now - kick that fucker into touch!

With a little editing, that could get tossed in the memebomb pile.