Welp, I was really hoping that I would have it together enough to write something other than yet another rambling and incoherent diary entry today, but I am not quite there. I was all feeling up and such earlier today, but I think I took one nap too many and had some of that Bad Sleep shit that plagues me, and now I am feeling kinda wobbly and not fit to try to assemble an article or a think piece or some shit.

I swear, I will write about the upcoming war with Iraq sometime soon, so I can seem faintly prescient.

Today was sort of an experiment. I wanted to see if I could actually catch up on sleep if I just slept enough. I was hoping that eventually, I would wake up feeling refreshed and recharged and ready to take on the world, or at least fully awake, and that if I tried to nap after that, I would just end up bored in bed and get sick of it and get back up again.

You know, it would be nice to just be done for a while, and enjoy a period of fully awake and aware existence, like I hear some humans do. Not be constantly sort of tired and kind of sleepy.

But what ended up happening was I had a bunch of decent sleep, then a major kaboom brain explosion of the bad kind, and now I feel a little more alert than before but not much.

I had some pretty interesting dreams during the Bad Sleep attack, but I don’t feel like going into them right now. Nobody really gives a shit about other people’s dreams anyhow, and like three quarters of last night’s entry was taken up by dream journaling, and I hate repeating myself.

I repeat, I hate repeating myself. I hate repeating myself! I hate it. ^[1]

No, I would rather ponder just what the fuck the deal is with this Bad Sleep shit tonight. It is really a major force in my life and has a lot to say about whether I am having a good day or not, and I can’t help but feel that I do not truly understand it and what is going on in me to cause it, and that if I could figure it out, not just intellectually but spiritually, I would have a much better grip on my life.

It occurs to me that I judge this sort of thing to be Bad Sleep largely because of how I feel after waking up from it. Usually, I feel like shit. Dizzy, disoriented, soaked in sweat, and so on. Declaring any sleep that ends that badly to be Bad Sleep is not exactly unreasonable. It is, in fact, perfectly sensible.

But it might also be missing the point. Maybe this kind of sleep is not so much bad as intense. Perhaps the more lasting effects come not from the sleep itself, but from my declaring it to be a bad thing and thus considering it to be a personal catastrophe when it happens. Perhaps if I could simply embrace it as a thing my mind (or soul) needs to do right now, or at least develop a neutral attitude towards it (that ever elusive philosophical attitude), it would do less damage and I would be happier.

It’s a possibility.

On the other hand, I am still considering the theory that the real cause is simply too much mental mojo built up. All that raw creative energy and intellectual stimulation that never leads to intellectual release (intellectual blue balls?) results in a mind that cannot sleep, cannot rest until it burns it all off.

And there I am, in the middle of the inferno.

No wonder I wake up covered in sweat and dehydrated. I am roasting alive in the fires of my own unused and unspent creativity. Another argument for writing way more than I do. A thousand words a day is not nearly enough. It would take a really big rig to cap this gusher.

In fact, honestly, I think I would have to write pretty much all the time I am on the computer. No more fuckign around playing Flash games, reading Fark, and all the other jagoff shit I do just to waste time. Like I am just biding time between the rare good parts of life. Like meals.

It’s a sad picture that paints.

But there is hope. I am slowly rolling this idea of writing all the time over and over in my mind, taking my time with it, no big leaps, hoping to just grow into the idea and settle into it as the next natural evolution of my life.

There is the other writing related stuff too, editing my work, submitting it here and there. On the practical level, obviously, I should totally be doing those things, and doing them a lot. And to not do them, to ignore them as I have been doing for weeks now except for little fits and starts, is clearly purely self-indulgent and lazy of me, and I will never get anywhere until I get my shit together and keep plugging away at the parts that are less fun and more scary and difficult and uncertain. I should be ashamed.

And so forth and so on.

But I am becoming increasingly aware that as much as part of me thinks practical concerns should always be one’s primary motivation, for obvious practical reasons, another part of me is beginning to realize that the supposedly practical point of view does not take a great many important and relevant factors into account, and is, in fact, simply insufficient in breadth and depth to be the entire basis of one’s life.

Sometimes, you have to follow your instincts and do what you feel like doing, not just what you think you should. And sometimes that means doing things which might seem crazy or stupid or just plain a bad idea.

It’s the sort of notion that will take me a long, long time to accept. But I feel the essential truth of it.

And I definitely need more to my life than my own cold rational thoughts.