Sleeplessness

So here I am, sitting on the couch in my living room, watching SNL on Netflix and slugging Vanilla Coke (Yeah bitches, it's back!). Sleep seems nearly impossible tonight, and I have no idea why. I've been on Christmas break for about a week now and my sleep schedule is getting hella weird. For at least the last three days I haven't been able to sleep until after three in the morning, then I sleep until almost noon. That's with me actually trying to sleep, and tonight seems different from those nights. I'm not even like thinking right now, just on total brain autopilot. I get weird when I don't sleep. I get all edgy and morbid. My imagination runs away with me and I think I see shit that isn't actually there, it's kinda weird.

Sleep is generally the only thing that maintains my attitude of calm and relaxed humor. It's been a long time since I didn't sleep for a night, I'm not eager to go back to that. I've already cleaned and filed and oiled my stage combat sword today, there's still a few little tarnish marks on it. Think I'll bust out the oxalic acid for that here in a little bit.

Chuckie Buks

I've been reading a lot of Charles Bukowski lately. I feel like he is me. Or at least a version of how I like to think of myself. First of all, Chuck doesn't give a FUCK. But I'm too much of a nice fucking guy to follow through on being like Chuck. Yeah, I drink a lot of whiskey. Yeah, I smoke like it's going out of style (which it is NOT!). Yeah I think about women almost constantly, albeit sometimes in more abstract ways than others. I wish I could be that gruff old man, playing chess in the park with a lifelong friend on an autumn afternoon (because I was sleeping all morning) looking around quickly and passing a big old flask back and forth. Yelling obscenities at the kids skateboarding by. Those bastards. No respect for anyone but themselves. Throwing my smoldering cigarette butts on the cold and leaf covered cobbles at my feet. Then we finish the game, maybe get lunch at a bar, say our goodbyes and agree to meet up and do the same thing next week. Then I go home, turn on the news, maybe I have a dog who is just as jaded as I am. And we just sit there. Mumbling at the TV, everything is wrong with the world, and we know how to fix it.

I've been writing a lot recently, which is nice. It started when I did NaNoWriMo last month. I'm not particularly proud o the final product. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud as hell that I got it done, and soon I'm gonna have that sweet sweet winner tshirt to wear around and prove that I'm better than other people, but the content isn't great. I guess that's acceptable for writing about 2000 words a day and not editing anything. I think there is definitely a solid foothold for a story in there, but especially the second half of the story just kind of devolved into some weird socio-philosophical manifesto. I hit a wall, you see, and instead of just working through it, I skipped all the parts I didn't know how to write. As a result, the second half of the story has turned into a lot of weird and only thinly related events without a through line. Still though, it's done.

Because I got into a habit of writing a lot, I've been trying to keep it up. I doubt many people know about my secret urge to be a famous poet. But yeah. I started carrying my little black book around again and scribbling in it. I've been averaging at least one good idea for a poem a day, some of them I flesh out, some I don't. It's kind of nice in the dead time between classes. I'll go find some quiet part of the university and just sit down, enjoy the scenery, maybe just watch people walk by, and try to write something.

I hope to god I never lose that little black book. It has my name and phone number in the front of it, but if anyone ever really looked through it, I fear they would think me insane. There's a lot of weird shit in there. Things no one besides me was ever meant to read. A lot of weird symbols, a couple half pages just covered with the same words written over and over again in different patterns and styles. I have an image to maintain, goddamnit.

Boredom.

I'm bored, so I thought I would check on the old, disused blog. I think it has a relative somewhere on the internet. Some other platform I once created to spout thoughts about whatever I happened to be interested in at the time. It is, however, long since forgotten. I don't remember what website it was on or through, the URL, my username, password, anything. It's just a fragment of what I thought about at one time. I doubt anything there is even really relevant to how I live or think now.

However, even those little fragments of thoughts, floating about in cyberspace, are more real than most of the thoughts we ever have. However difficult it may be to find or make sense of, they still function as proof that the person who wrote them exists. Or did at one point.

I remember reading XKCD one day and it was one of those rare occasions where it wasn't really about humor. The comic talked about what happens to a person's internet life once they die. For example, I usually leave my computer on all of the time, simultaneously logged in to a bunch of different websites. Gmail, some forums, facebook. But when someone dies, it takes a long time for their trace to disappear. Maybe on some forum, they were a great contributor, and one day they just sort of disappeared. People wondered where they went for a while. Maybe they just moved on, maybe their computer broke, maybe they moved to the heart of the amazon, to get away from it all, and didn't tell anyone. People check their profile sometimes, just to see. One, two, three months since last login. Their sessions start to time out one by one, subscriptions expire. Server resets close out their autologins. They stop getting email from everyone except a few spambots. Eventually, once all their accounts have been inactive long enough, they start getting deleted, and then one day it's like they never existed at all.

Sometimes people read the things I write about and think I'm a morbid person, thinking about death a lot. I disagree. I think I'm much happier for my ability to consider the realistic effects of death. Simply because I'm not afraid of it.

Philosophically, I feel like I fall in a weird category. I have my own "religious" leanings. Politically I'm more a Libertarian than anything else, although that came from a conservative childhood and very liberal adolescence. I have some (a lot of) objectivist leanings (thanks Ayn Rand, you ruined me for all the other neighborhood cats). Yet I try to be mindful and respectful of life in general. Oh well, se la vie.