Insomnia Log 3

Polaris wrote the soundtrack to the '90s Nickelodeon TV show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Right now the song "She Is Staggering" from that soundtrack is playing in my head on repeat, especially the lines, "I couldn't get to sleep/ And then I couldn't eat/"

My shoulder keeps popping, and I'm not even a street performer.

I want to cook something awesome again, but I've been eating leftovers from restaurants and family meals for weeks now.

I wish there were a book titled How to Fall Asleep. I've got a few other How to books, and most of them are about drawing, which won't help right now.

The place I really work (I actually have to work for "The Man" and show up somewhere every weekday morning) has new faces around me all the time. (There are also new bodies attached to these new faces, but a masquerade would be fun every once in a while.) A considerable fraction of faces I only see for a few months. It feels a bit like a claw machine that keeps filling up with new plush toys and leaving some old ones at the bottom, you know, like the bears that have one eye upside down that no one wants. I had a friend in college who could win at the claw machine maybe 50% of the time, which is really good, and he gave away his bounty of plush animals. I took away a few of the crooked-eyed rejects. They needed a good home.

I keep hearing a big drip around my bedroom window. It's been like that since November. I don't see water damage anywhere, so I think it's OK. That drip sound is not regular, so it makes it even harder to sleep on a night like this.

I want some milk, but I think my tummy would get mad at me.

I want a guitar effects pedal that makes airy distortion like the kind I hear in songs by Polaris, The Pretenders, and Throwing Muses, but that's the only way I can describe it. That's my favorite guitar sound. I don't hear it anywhere anymore.

I don't know if I told you, but I tutor children younger than thirteen in math and other subjects. It's a "drop-in" tutoring program, so any number of students and subjects could appear. Yesterday the program coordinator and I were the only tutors for about eight students, all needing one-on-one attention. I was disappointed I didn't figure out how to clone myself in my experiments when I was nine. At one point the coordinator left for the library, asking if I could hold down the fort. I said, "Sure," but thought, Oh no, I know one of them is going to faint or cry or maybe they'll get in a fight while he's gone and I have no training in resolving conflicts between children, oh man what am I going to do?

I love the movie MirrorMask. The main character Helena finds a book called A Really Useful Book in her adventure in the movie. I want such a book right now to give some advice about sleeping, or maybe just help me think about life in general. None of my current books have "useful" in the title. What was I thinking in buying them?!

Yours awake,
Art

A Sonnet About Writing Poetry

I wrote a Petrarchan Sonnet in Iambic pentameter about writing poetry as part of an application for volunteer work at a writing center. It is below. I am now a volunteer there.

They say it's difficult to write a rhyme
That meter's ticking like a metronome
And one's organic voice is now a drone
How can a writer feel in marking time?
In freeform I respect a blob of nouns
But I don't know which ones I should display
I might just throw a dart at what to say
But no, it lands on one I can't pronounce
I know! I'll pick up my guitar and sing!
Then words will have to come out to the beats
And I'll pretend I had them all along
Well, shoot, guitar's one thing I didn't bring
But in my heart there's one line that repeats:
"Write from myself, and then those words belong."

Wreturning to Writing,
Art

Insomnia Log 2

It's 4 AM where I am, and the ghostly blue light of my phone is keeping my face lit and my eyes strained. I just woke up on the couch. Funny how waking up on the couch is never as rewarding as falling asleep on the couch. I'm subletting a bedroom from my friend, but I'm still falling asleep on the couch. Apparently I did this once and then crawled back to my bed unconsciously, waking up in my bed to think I was never on the couch. It scares me to think about what I do when I sleepwalk.

I'm thinking about just staying up at this point. If I go back to bed, I'll wake up at noon, and coworkers might not like that. I suppose I could eat, groom, and go to work now, but then I'd arrive two hours earlier than "early". 4 AM is the rendezvous point for night owls and early birds.

Wilco talks about Bible-black predawn. It exists only at 4 AM. Don't miss it!

—Art

Insomnia Log 1

I am awake enough at odd hours (odd being 01:00, 03:00, 05:00) that I'm going to start chronicling my thoughts at these times. You may or may not like it.

I used to eat Kashi Heart to Heart cereal every morning with vanilla yogurt. In those days, I sometimes ate that breakfast with the strongest (muscularly) woman I've ever met and heard Beyoncé's Single Ladies over the speakers. I'm eating it right now without any yogurt because yogurt gives me milk tummy these days. We all know milk tummy is a nice placeholder for what really happens.

I remember watching Beast Wars when I was a kid, but I don't remember liking it very much. It just happened to be on in the mornings. These days, I'd rather sit in silence than watch TV I don't like, but as a kid, silence was scary. I'm bringing this up because my roommate put on the old Transformers TV show. Transformers' animation was not fluid, to put it nicely.

I think my old roommates like me more now that I don't live with them. That's strange, but acceptable. I saw them at a bar tonight, and they were friendly, even laughing at what I had to say. Maybe it's easier to get along with people when you know you don't have to wake up to them.

The dryer is running. It sounds like an ineffective Coinstar machine, or like pennies and golf balls going down a drainpipe, plinking and ticking and tumbling. Clothes are going to come out damp.

I'm going to take a shower soon and put on new clothes as if I had just woken up, but I will have just painted over a tired day with the smell of fresh deodorant. In times like these, I always think, "Eh, I can sleep on the plane."

I took apart a laptop computer for work. That's the easy part. Now how do I put it back together?

Aw, man, my coffee is going to get cold. Cold coffee is just dirty water.

Au revoir.

—Art