Insomnia

It’s currently 3:55 AM.

My crazy last week where I was averaging about four hours of sleep a night seems to have permanently ruined me, because my body has adapted and now I haven’t been able to sleep more than four hours any day this week either. Try as I may.

I tried going to bed around 1 AM tonight. Three hours and a few gallons of camomile tea later, and it’s currently 3:56. AND I’M WIDE AWAKE. In less than five hours, I have to get up. I keep staring at my alarm clock, with those hypnotic, red digital numbers, and just like that, it’s 3:57.

Who knows, maybe sitting in on support group meetings for leukemia or testicular cancer will help me sleep. I might as well start up an anarchist underground boxing club also. 4:01 now. And I’m kind of taken aback that my poorly written, stupid reference to Fight Club took me an entire FOUR minutes to think of and write.

The problem is there are too many lights in my room, even in the dark. I’ll never need a night light, because even when the lights are off, my room is still illuminated by a starry sky of blinking LEDs from my cell phone, computer, DVD player, and what not. 4:03.

4:04 now.

What really sucks is that if I were to shut everything off in my room — my cell phone, computer, DVD player — and if I closed my blinds completely shut and stuffed a bath towel under the crack of the door to my apartment, well... I wouldn’t be able to locate my bed in the darkness. Even worse, once in bed, everything would be too pitch black for me to stare at the ceiling. Mama always told me to eat my carrots, but I didn’t listen, and now look at what’s happened: I don’t have enough vitamin A in my system to see in the dark.

Anyway, I’m rambling, and now it’s 4:10.

I just IMed my friend Colin (who has his first class at noon tomorrow and can afford to be up late) and complained to him that I’m having trouble falling asleep, and you know what he just told me? He told me to whack off. Ejaculation releases serotonin into the blood, he said, which makes you drowsy in the same way that eating lots of turkey during Thanksgiving makes you drowsy.

Now, that’s a perfectly fine idea, but here’s why I don’t want to do it: it might work too well. No one wants to spank their monkey and then be immediately too tired to bother cleaning themselves off, and then finding themselves the next morning covered all over in their own dry, crusty... flakes.

What I’m aiming for is not a remedy that will knock me out in seconds, but something that will make me fall asleep in 5-10 minutes after laying in bed.

It’s 4:17 now.

Hey. Here’s a joke. You’ll laugh. What do you get if you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?

Someone who stays up all night wondering if there really is a dog.

Hehe. Well, believe it or not, all this typing has made me sleepy. Yawn. Time to hit the hay. Yawn. Goodnight, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.