No Sleep (I'm sure that's the name of some death metal song)

I'm listening to the sound of rain falling in some jungle somewhere, or maybe it's just someone's back porch. Who cares. In any case, it's what I use to *attempt* to fall asleep; and if my emphatic "*'s" weren't a big enough clue, "attempt" is the key word.

I have trouble sleeping. I think most people do. I used to think most people just said they had trouble sleeping, but I'm starting to think that was just another instance of me being a stupid douchebag, a phase in my life I'm trying to move past. But I do have trouble sleeping. I suffer from hyposomnia, like all new parents and coke addicts. This isn't insomnia, by the way, where there's no sleep. Hyposomnia is "little sleep." Thanks to my knowledge of Greek prefixes, you just got a lesson in linguistics, bitches.

But yeah, I can't sleep, hyposomnia, whatever. And it's all my brain's fault, that jerk. Here's an analogous situation to my brain when I try to sleep: you know that scene in some movie/cartoon where there's a hallway with doors on each side, and people run in and out of the doors, back and forth, very fast, one group chasing another, with weird, campy music playing, and people come in and out of doors at random, sometimes with their friends, sometimes with their pursuers and when they notice it they share a laugh and keep running? Yeah, that's my fuckin' brain - all the damn time.

When I was younger and playing guitar/piano/throat six hours a day, music would be zipping in and out of my head all night. A melody here, chord change there, some dream about being a rockstar in the middle, and it sucked. It made sleep a pain, a chore, so I would just not to do it. Why take out the garbage when you could just sit around and play some more Halo, right? That's how I approached it.

Well, that's not true. That's how I eventually approached it. I initially tried finding ways to fall asleep. I figured I just needed to relax my mind, focus it more, and things would become calm, placid, like a lake without ripples on the surface. I had some mild training in meditation, so I would give it a try each night. Well, my brain did focus, but it only made me more aware of everything - sounds, thoughts, Jesus, and so on. I researched it in a book or something and found out that meditation actually makes sleep harder, because you're not really relaxing your brain in the sense that it wants to sleep, but rather, you're relaxing it as preparation, for something: war, sex, World of Warcraft all-nighters - stuff like that. So that shit didn't work.

So then I tried counting sheep, and that would always end up being absurd. I would start out imagining a line of sheep individually leaping over some fence in a grass field, and I would count. Well, naturally, my brain sub-subconciously developed a rhythm and I began to count within the context of this meter I'd created. And now here's where it gets absurd: whenever I'm "thinking rhythmically" like this (it happens a lot), my brain will quickly start to screw shit up. Seriously, it starts making things difficult and I can't stop it. In this case, it began making the sheep jump at odd intervals, so that they were no longer in rhythm. And then if I somehow wrestled my mind into making things normal, the fence would start getting higher, which would again affect the rhythm. And if I started counting faster, the sheep would start taking longer to show up in the "pre-jump" area. No shit, this is my brain, people. It's ridiculous.

So, yeah, I quit that sheep jumping stuff. I then tried counting, just straight numbers. Going up from 1 in whole number order got boring, and didn't do anything but piss me off (at some point 401, 402, 403, and 404 gets annoying, not tiring). So then I started counting back from large numbers by three, as in: 100, 97, 94, 91, 88, 85, 82, 79... This never made me fall asleep, and so I would start at larger and larger numbers, or I would continue into negative integers once I hit zero, or I would start at a negative integer and go up. I tried a number of things (awful/unintentional pun), and nothing worked. So I dropped that as well.

And that's when I started listening to falling rain. I'd previously tried jungle music, nature sounds, birds chirping, but it was all stupid, and it kept my brain awake as it tried to simultaneously predict what sounds were coming next and attempt to force a rhythm to the sounds of nature, which wasn't very successful. It's hard to sleep when your brain is pulling itself in multiple directions without your input.

But falling rain did it, for a while. Something about the consistency of rain was soothing. This particular track had a good rain storm that had thunder strikes dotting it like pimples on a fat kid, and so if my brain were to get too comfortable inside the rhythm of the rain, thunder would blow up the whole thing and force me out of it. So it worked, for the most part. I would close my eyes and imagine myself sitting on some porch in Missouri watching the rain...and I would drift asleep.

I think now, though, I need a new track, because it's not working anymore. I say a new track, and not a new method, because I think my brain has figured this one out, its rhythms, its thunder hits, its changes in rain dynamic intensity, and so it's remembering everything as it happens, locking into the rhythm, and keeping me awake. Hence the blog post at 1:16am after a long day of little sleep, which followed three straight days of long nights of little sleep. Hence my pounding headache. Hence - oh whatever.

Sleep sucks, it always has, and I'm just gonna read until I pass out. That always does the trick, though my pass out time always varies. Sigh. At least it consistently hits the endzone (unlike my Dallas Cowboys - OH!!!!).

Oh and sorry Philippi: no pictures for you. Oh yeah, and I got that job at the ASU State Press. So here's to someone actually desiring that I write for them. Wow. Take that one, world.