Time to Smoke

I'd begun, foolishly, to think my insomnia was a thing of the past. I hadn’t suffered an attack since August, and that wasn’t really insomnia, it was jet lag. Last night I was particularly tired and felt shagged out after grading 8 papers in an hour and watching Kyle MacGlaughlin mime jacking off into the sink on Sex and the City. I hit the sack at midnight, fell asleep immediately and woke up perhaps five minutes later with agitated thoughts leaping each other across the hemispheres of my brain. My ego, a captain overthrown by mutinous hoards, rolled back and forth across the empty hull of my rudderless skull in a veritable tumult of discharging dendrites.

I knew without checking that the moon was a waning gibbous—when I get screaming insomnia it’s always just past the full moon, and as a result I never look up at night lest seeing Astarte in her full glowing glory will fulfill my self-fulfillable prophecies. “Fucking jackoff,� you’ll say. “We’re a few centuries past the Enlightenment and you think the moon controls your sleep cycle?� I don’t know that it does, I simply point out that I get hammered more often than not as the moon begins its decline. And if the moon can pull the seething deeps of the oceans landward it surely can stir my tiny soul! I lay, eyes dry, too tired to read, watch a movie, or think straight, praying for sleep. Cha came to bed an hour later and I turned my internal rage against her, but internally only—she blasted open the door and thumped rudely down on her side of the bed. Joining the chorus of mournful voices in my head was a new plaint: she knows I’m a light sleeper—if I were actually asleep she would’ve woken me with that bullshit. I want a divorce. Surly, guilty at such stupid maudlin thoughts, I pretended to be asleep so she wouldn’t ask if I had insomnia and further agitate me with her useless concern. Soon she was snoring and I was reminded of a commercial for some sleep aid where a dried up waif stares at the ceiling in bed, wide awake, as her spouse tosses and turns. She bashes him with a skillet. That commercial is not funny to me the way amusing caricatures of drunks are not funny to the children of alcoholics.

I remember vividly looking at the clock at 2, 2:43, 3:18, 4:22. How can I be so tired that I can’t focus on New Yorker cartoons, and yet I’m not tired enough to sleep? The body needs it, the brain don’t care. Too many thoughts, too many narratives at once: I’m stuck on a bridge over the Danang river with Duras, who at age 15 is wearing a men’s felt hat and high heels and trying to explain why she did so at a far-removed future time. I’m also waiting for a train to Dumbledore with H. Potter, and studying the attempts at Anglo-German co-operation at the turn of the last century, continually advanced due to a potentially destabilizing Russo-French relationship, but always failing because Germany covets England’s vast colonial holdings—things come to a head in China, in Morocco, in Egypt, and the Boer War don’t help atall, no indeedy. Kafka seethes in my brain because I taught The Metamorphosis and discussed the unanchored angst rampant amongst intellectuals at that time, diminished by Darwin, addled by Freud, agitated by Marx. At one point I had to summarize Oedipus Rex because I discussed Gregor Samsa’s icky problem in terms of the Oedipal Complex, and got blank stares, and got further blank stares when I described it in a nutshell because no one had heard of the story (I have I believe 7 English majors, and three Psych majors in that class. Most of them are juniors and seniors. What the fuck ARE they reading?). Imagine mimicking Oedipus, in despair, blinding himself with broaches from his mommy's bosom--that's me at 9:14am yesterday. No wonder I can't sleep ever again. Gregor’s sister feeds him after he becomes a cockroach, and he hides himself under a sheet in order to not scare her, but a tiny erect piece of him always manages to protrude nonetheless; he leaves a “sticky substance� all over his room that she finds distasteful, and his father, whenever he moves in his locked room, is always shouting “What is he up to in there?� I tell my students this is nothing more than the original dessert most recently served up as a heapin' slice o'American Pie . As Gregor is diminished, the father is rejuvenated—Freud all the way baby. Alienation from labor? Marx! Transformation into a new mutant beast? Darwin. There are six students who read everything and who participate constantly in our discussions—the other 16 are rather silent, and aren’t reading. Friday, my dears, you get a pop quiz! I punish you for not reading by making sure your grade will suffer if you don’t. I hereby turn my class into a Skinner Box.

Too, too many different stories, too much info, I’m stuffing my head and then I wonder why I stay awake all night. My students’ essays! Oh, God—the woefully insipid inanities: “The event that changed my life was when I learned how to ride my bike without training wheels.� Stop. Could there be a more enveloping banality? I’m in a vortex of ingenuousness. “My most important experience was tasting Applebee’s Triple Decker Club for the first time. Now, I get one at least once a week…� 3 pages about a sandwich created by an assembly line out of bagged ingredients. Worse are the actual horrors some kids have gone through—the student whose cousins live with her because their parents and older sister were on TWA 800; The young man whose father was a crack dealer and was knifed in prison and died; The Alzheimer’s; The friend who drove drunk and died; The breast cancer.

After teaching this morning I tried again to sleep, but the bed was unwelcoming and no matter what measures I took there was too much light creeping in around the black-out curtains. What better time to have received from Netflix



I watched it before work—a perfect film for the agitated neurotic, questioning his own sanity. Now I want to call some old contacts I met someplace some time ago, “Hey man, it’s me.�


“Get the fuck out dog! I ain’t heard from y’all in ages byieatch.� Suspicious to hear from me, alert. I can hear it in his voice.

“You know what I need.�


And I get it and there’s movement in the rug and on the wall and in the fibers of my shirt. No, can’t go back to that, tho a fingernail of fine resin handrolled in Morocco from sticky sticky good greenies? Oh, yeah, lipsmacking lungsfull of mellow fetid choke, opening the vaulted arches of my cathedral brain to introspective reveries—and two bags of chips! No, can’t do that. Buy a pack of Camels

Excuse this little interlude but some heavily tatooed dude was instantly drawn to me in the liquor store where I bought my cigarettes and started to tell me his luck with Lotto and then about his girlfriend. I often get latched onto by tough rednecky guys who start telling me their life story. WTF!

Oh, and another interlude, NK was just down here and winked conspiratorially and said "M's not here today--we can all be in our own little worlds." Actually, I typically am anyhow, down here in the offwhite dungeon with a funeral home's beige lighting.

and some dreadful thick caffeinated thing from Starbucks instead. Get through tonight (I’ll be missing the debates, sitting at the desk—probably good if I want TO FUCKING SLEEP later anyway), hand out a quiz tomorrow, and it’s the weekend. Yippeee. It won’t matter if I can’t sleep because I’ve got more Netflix, a Fellini-not-yet-seeny:



And he’s like my new guy, like The Guy now for me.