Why I can't sleep

Why I can't sleep

I begin by thinking about my being a very old man; I continue by thinking

each day might be the day where a lump or pain becomes something else,

where the body turns its course against me, and that day will be a day of

division. Or perhaps there will be a night from which there is no

awakening, and this remains deeply unimaginable. I continue by thinking

about my family relationships, how I have to permanently sever ties with

people who were dear to me, simply in order to psychically survive. This

leads to a recent article on post-traumatic stress syndrome, the obdurate

circulation of memories which become a permanent part of the psychic

landscape: something to trip over. After death they're meaningless, just

as memories are only stories that fade. I worry deeper into the body,

wondering about arthritis and stroke, when I'll no longer be able to play

music live, to cohere with the muscle memory that governs me, renders me

ecstatic at times - when I'll only be able to listen, when my fingers and

hands won't do my bidding. This leads to thoughts of speed, always working

to create something new, to continue probing, until probing is no longer

possible; at least I won't have wasted any time. This leads darker and

further into thinking about my cross-posting, my incessant production, so

that there's no breathing-room, and this then couples with what I see as

my lack of success, always on the verge of 'making it,' always on the

verge of collapse, and how unfair that is to my partner Azure, what she

has to put up with on a daily basis. I then wish I could burn that part of

my mind out, I think of the Higgs boson and the nonsense over neutrinos

and whether I'll live long enough to even have an inkling of some

unimaginable truth. I then think of one of the books that discussed my

work, and my appearing a nuisance on various email lists and other places

of encounter, and further my letters begging for work, which I no longer

send out since, at my age, I'm already excluded from the possibility of

hire. I think of my diminution, the extraction of two teeth, the original

lenses from my eyes due to cataract, and when and where this will end or

prove fatal or result in a loss of mind. This last is of most concern, and

every bit of forgetting is seen as a sign of dementia on my part, as if

I'm waiting for proof of closing down. I worry about getting addicted to

too many sleeping pills or pain pills or stress pills or depression pills

and keep jumbling them up or refusing to take them, hoping that original

mind will manifest itself. I curse god and gods because I can't believe

and the result is sinking into absolute annihilation. I worry about the

short dreams I have rummaging around childhood or sexuality or unknown

seas, and I hate waking from them, which happens almost immediately,

throwing me back into the matrix of these thoughts, this almost

catastrophic thinking, which dominates me, while I listen to the cat and

Azure sleeping and worry about them, their health, the stress I must put

them through. I wonder whether my friends who were over the other night

would want some guitar or other instrument cases, or laptop cases or even

laptops, and whether I should trade the hasapi and guzheng instruments in

for something smaller, since our place is crowded. I keep hoping I'll live

long enough to move to a less-polluted part of the city, and worry about

the appointment I have tomorrow morning with the pulmonologist to get the

result of the chest x-ray, and whether I should start trading in, or

selling, larger quantities of books, since I may not have that much time

left to read. I worry that my reading The Diary of a Late Physician from

1832 might be affecting me negatively, and I wonder how my friends deal

with their own at times extremely depressive reading. I keep thinking I

should awake quietly, leave the bed, turn the computer on, and start

typing this out. I worry about making too many typing errors, and whether

this too is a sign of dementia. I try to decide whether lazily to leave

the errors in, or correct all of them, and still haven't reached a

conclusion. I worry that my tinnitus might finally get completely out of

control, since the other day it took a turn for the worse and is now

really quite loud with changing, not steady, pitch. I worry whether the

minor infections and fevers I seem to have mean anything, or whether

they're a sign of psychosomatic problems related to the usual traumas. I

begin to fear what will happen next week when my Eyebeam residency

formally comes to an end, whether I'd still be able to do anything as an

'alumnus' or some such, or whether they'd be glad to get rid of a nuisance

with his despairing and disparate work. I worry that somewhere along the

line on Facebook I was called a 'troubled man,' and I wonder whether I'm a

man at all in fact, and whether my neurotic behavior is so severe that I

won't be taken seriously as a 'thinker,' or 'musician,' or any one of a

hundred identities I aspire to. I worry that people find me a dilettante,

and that even my oud playing is so grotesque that I'm humored at best for

my clumsy attempts at playing. I fear that my few friends will become

fewer still and will leave me, or that we will settle in another city

where I'm seen as a freak or monster, and I wonder whether other people

lead lives of continuous regret, or how other people justify the horrors

they, too, must inflict on the world. I worry about the end of megafauna

and the inhumanity of our species, its deep commitment to slaughter and

torture, and those images of battered and wounded animals gracing PETA and

National Geographic publications, and I don't understand why we don't all

rise up in fury at the injustice of it all. I'm scared I'm technologically

falling behind, that my graphics or still too sexual or too crude, that

people would despise me if they looked closely at my work. I worry I'm too

arrogant or appear too arrogant, too selfish, too self-absorbed, and I

wonder if my father was right in what he said about my relationship with

my daughter and for that matter the rest of the family, and what made him

so psychologically violent against me. I wonder if thinking that way is

nothing more than an excuse. I continue to think perhaps I should take yet

another pill to try and fall back asleep, keep the gremlins away, and I

worry that all the early happiness I had writing into my characters has

disappeared - where are Nikuko, Jennifer, Honey, Travis, Clara, Alan, and

Julu, when I need them and their brightness just to think through the day?

I wonder when the construction noises are going to begin again and I'm

embarrassed and saddened we never were able to stop the pollution of the

arena going up across the street. I think it's probably time to leave the

computer which is now carrying a complete and true account of my thinking

for the evening on a typical night, hoping that a philosophical remnant

might remain here, wanting to just email this, cross-posting to everyone's

misery and horror, before the dawn comes and I have to awaken, if I fall

asleep, filled with the chills that usually accompany me in the early

morning, as if I had a severe flu, and so forth. And I worry that this

'and so forth' carries nothing with it but self-pity, that it's another

example of 'the troubled man' and his 'neurosis,' going nowhere, saying

nothing, an exercise in futility and the imaginary of illness, philosophy,

and the dead.