From the Archives: Ativan (June 2006)

I cannot sleep. It is late, but not that late. The hour time difference is nothing really, and the amount of time spent sleeping
when I’m here is ridiculous, inordinate even. Ativan in the bathroom. There are only a few left, less than three, I think. Have I gone
through that many? Memory serves that I took some – sometimes two a night – to fall asleep, but I don’t remember going through that many.

Welcome to the most boring bit of writing ever. Sorry, it’s all I could come up with on such short notice.

So, in a moment born of utter futility (not really, but I’m saying it for dramatic tension, really, that’s the only reason. The writer’s
got to pretend that he can’t really think of anything to say and that it’s tearing him apart, he hasn’t been able to write for so long and
there’s this torrent of words building in him, but that’s not actually the case here. Truth be told, he doesn’t really give a shit about it,
he just wants to get some sleep and feel better in the morning. His stomach is a little upset, maybe from drinking too much and taking too many pills. That on it’s own is a pretty good realization that he’s on his way to being a writer. After all, insomnia, alcoholism, and chemical dependence is what’s important, and not so much where he decided to put the fucking parenthesis, alright?), our reluctant hero decides that he will try some of that “stream of consciousness” writing that all the kids are talking about, but he’s pretty sure that
he can’t get it down. After all, it seems kind of complicated, and he’s worried that his keystrokes are going to keep his girlfriend
awake, regardless of the fact that she’s wide awake and reading “The Time Traveler’s Wife” in bed. It seems that maybe he shouldn’t, as
usual, be worried about just what it is that his girlfriend is doing and should instead focus on what it is that he’s supposed to be doing,
but that’s really something that he’s always had a problem with, isn’t it?

He seems to, for the moment at least, but hopefully for longer, if not forever, have gotten his intimacy problem in check. Now he’s good at something again, if only the ability to make women have frighteningly powerful orgasms. It’s a little, vain thing, but hey, at least it’s something. You’ve got to make do with what you’ve got. There are good and bad things about this situation, however. The good is that he no longer spends hours loathing his inability to get it up, knowing that the two of them could be having giddy amounts of sweaty, breathless sex. The bad news is that he now spends hours thinking about the next time the two of them could be having that sweaty, breathless sex, and wondering exactly what to do until then. Instead of loathing himself, now he loathes the time between. It’s a vicious circle, really, and kind of sad. But again, it is what it is.

For other reasons unknown to him, he finds that it’s easier to refer to himself in the third person than in the first. He doesn’t know why
this is, but he feels that not only is the writing less self-important, but also a little less jumbled and choppy, regardless of his penchant for run-on sentences and tangential thoughts. It’s 2:20 am now and he’s still awake, thinking of silly, non-consequential things to jot down in the hopes that maybe he could open the file a few weeks later and find some sort of literary gold. He smiles wanly at this, as well as the fact that for the first time in days Appleworks has actually made it to Page 2. That’s such a victory, he should be breaking out the bottle and corkscrew. He chooses sleep over celebration, at least this time.

Random fact #233. His brain moves very slowly some days. Thoughts prove sufficiently resistant to being manipulated into place, though he still can string words together colorfully. They may not make any sense, but at least they’re interesting. That wasn’t the fact,
however. The fact is that his brain moves slowly and he feels tired, but often he lays down to take a nap and finds that, once his eyes are closed, his thoughts quicken. They remain as hard to pin down as before, but now they are liquid and mercurial instead of thick and
leaden. He becomes more awake when his eyes are closed. Do you see the problem now? He is always sleepy when he is awake because he is always more awake when he is trying to sleep. He could call it “The Tyranny of Wakefulness” or “The Tyranny of Daylight” or really “The Tyranny of Whatever The Hell You Want”, but none of those titles really fit, do they? The only thing tyrannical about the situation are his nervous twitches, but “The Tyranny of the Nervous Twitch” hardly seems like a spot-on title.