Insomnia

December 15, 2004

It’s 1:25 in the A.M. and I can’t sleep. My brain is spinning in too many directions. I lie down and one too many thoughts try to take center stage in my mind. Work, love, sex, bills, death and art are all vying for my undivided attention. So I get up. I turn on the TV. I have a cigarette. I change the channel. I have another cigarette. I have a glass of wine. I change the channel. I try to read a book while drinking a glass of wine, watching TV and smoking. I consider calling someone, but I don’t have anything coherent or worthy of a middle of the night phone call. So I grab my smokes, the bottle of wine and Tom Waits and head for the computer. I sit down in my high backed pleather office chair and turn my back to the painting I have been cursing at for weeks now. I have no idea why I bought the paints and canvas. Apparently, I needed some artistic frustration in my life.

I love Tom Waits. He makes me want to drink whiskey out of the bottle. Too bad it usually makes me puke. Whiskey, not Tom.

So now I will try to exorcise the sleep blocking demons from my mind. Let’s start with work. Work. Something I do in order to avoid being the guy at the end of the freeway ramp. I don’t like doing it. I don’t know many people who do. Yet somehow I manage to allow it to infect me. I become obsessive. I work too many hours. I spend too many hours thinking about it when I am not there. A man without work is lost. For some reason I live by this creed. I have no idea why. Nobody ever told me that. Nobody ever said, “You will find your meaning for existence in work.” Yet that is what I seek. I crave validation, not from the fruits of my labor, but from the labor itself. (I wonder what Freud would say about the fact that when I typed labor, valor appeared on the page.)

Sing it Tom. I wonder how many cigarettes I will have to smoke before my voice sounds like yours. Millions I suspect. Am I up to the challenge? Will my lungs give out before my voice gets gravely? Only time and my future oncologist will tell.

Love. Now there is a subject that I have certainly made a mockery of. I am skilled at falling in love. I am an artisan at romance. I understand the seduction. I can dance the dance. It’s amazing what being kind and supportive will get you in this life. I have been in love with some amazing women. Smart, funny, creative, beautiful women. And I have screwed it up every time. Is it genetic? Is it learned? Nature versus nurture? Can I blame my parents? I think not. Although I mimic much of their behavior, I also watched with open eyes as they made their mistakes and was never short of criticism. Perhaps I don’t feel I deserve love? Hardly. I may be a journeyman in self-deprecation, but I am also my own biggest fan. A lovely woman once told me that my ego protected the world from the hole in the ozone layer. Touché. Even in jest the joust was indefensible. So why can’t I succeed in the love department? Maybe it isn’t love that I don’t deserve. Maybe it’s happiness. I am never happier than when I am first in love. New love holds unlimited potential. Marriage, children and a nice place to live always seem attainable. (“This ain’t a purchase, it’s a rental, and it’s purgatory.” Well said Tommy. And well timed. You know me so well….) But I can kill any dream with the deadly weapon called reality. Why get married? I’ll just end up getting divorced. Children? Please. I already have two offspring and I already fear that they will turn out like me. And a nice place to live? Me, buy a house? Yeah, it’s a nice dream, but that’s all it is. Perhaps it’s just pessimism. In the end I just can’t buy into the dream entirely. I’m not sure what to make of it. Maybe there is hope I will get it right. Only time will tell.

Ah, French wine. For a country of smelly cowards they sure know how to make good grape juice.

Sex. This is a favorite topic of mine. I take great pride that at times I am pretty damn good at it. Oddly enough, my interest in the topic was born out of fear of failure. I just didn’t want to be bad at it. I believe that good sex is something that stays with you. You never forget the people who knew how to curl your toes. And I don’t want to be forgotten. I want to be the guy that retains high marks when put up against my competitors. And I do think of it as a competition. In my favorite novel the main character is so good in bed that for most women it is a punishment to sleep with him. Because afterward, they will spend the rest of their lives trying to find a lover that good. I may never be that good, but I see it as a worthy goal. I want to be the guy who makes you make noises you haven’t made before. I want to be the guy you think of and smile. “Yeah, he knew what he was doing.” It’s funny (or sad) that I just assume that I will be replaced. I can live with that, just as long as I am not forgotten.

I am running low on smokes. I will have to make a point of living within walking distance of a 24 convenience store next time I move.

Bills. Somewhere along the line, I developed a bill paying dysfunction. No, not just a dysfunction, but a disability. I can sit down and budget my life. I make this much money, so I can spend this much money and still have money left over. The math is easy. However, when it comes time to write the check, I develop a life threatening cramp in my writing hand. So I have learned how to not open my mail. In fact I am particularly good at not retrieving my mail. I let it build up. Usually, I only visit the mailbox weekly. Sometimes I wait longer. More than once in my life the post office has given up on me. Why, I ask you, would a man who makes a decent living and who lives a relatively Spartan life avoid paying his bills? No, really, why? It doesn’t make any sense. The only thing I can come up with is car repairs. I have an almost suicidal passion for crappy used cars. I can’t bring myself to purchase a new car, because that would add one more bill for me to avoid. So I drive cars that should have been put out to pasture years ago. However, the thing about a crappy used car is that it is always just about to break down. So you are always just a few miles away from a repair. And if you have gone and paid all your bills, you might not have enough to pay for the car repair. Truthfully this is just a reinterpretation of Descartes’ argument for the existence of God. God exists because the Bible says so and the Bible is correct because God is the primary source. So I don’t pay my bills because Descartes needed to kiss ass to the Catholic Church. Now that I can live with.

“…and a line of thunderstorms was developing in the early morning ahead of a slow moving cold front, cold blooded, with tornado watches issued shortly before noon Sunday, for the areas including, the western region of my mental health and the northern portions of my ability to deal rationally with my disconcerted precarious emotional situation, it's cold out there” The guy is a lyrical fucking genius.

Death. Hmm, what to say about that. Would you think me morose if I said that I was ready? I can’t say I walk out the door each day looking for it, but it does feel like it’s just waiting around the corner. One wrong turn. Just one misstep. One slip on a ladder. One unchewed pretzel. My grandmother once said, “At this point I am just waiting to die.” I hope it takes me before I get to that point. Death kinda feels like that bus you wait for on a real cold night. The ride isn’t particularly inviting, but standing there shifting your weight, clenching and unclenching your fists isn’t all that fun either. So you light a smoke and test the theory that a lit cigarette is like a beacon in the night for a graffiti covered ship lost in the seas of a big city. Well, I keep lighting up and testing the theory. I’ll publish my findings when I get an answer.

It’s working. I’m getting tired, just one more subject to mull, one more glass of wine and one more burn and I should be able to slide off into the comforting ether of sleep.

Art. The cruelest of all mistresses. I have battled with my creative impulses most of my life. Singing, dancing, acting, directing, writing and painting. I always say that if I could do it all again I would learn to operate heavy machinery. But the truth is I would probably do it just the same. There is certain insanity in creativity. A fire that burns inside you that is always threatening to become an inferno that will engulf you. The people who succeed creatively seem to have the ability to gauge just how high the flames can go. They know how to add just enough fuel to keep it hot, but under control. I never learned how to control it. When I neglect it, I freeze up inside. But when I want the fire to burn, I always tend you use gasoline instead of kindling. I will keep trying. That is for sure. It’s unavoidable. There are too many ideas in my head, too many expressions that need to be presented to the world. Too many things that keep me up at night. Maybe I will just write for a while. As long as I have Tom, cigarettes and wine, the stuff will keep spilling out of me.

Thanks for listening. I’m tired now and I need to get some sleep.

Goodnight.

Eric