The head on my shoulders, that is. Today has been super damned sleepy, which is unpleasant and a pain in the ass besides. But I am trying not to let it get me down.

I am not surprised at this turn of events. I have been having trouble sleeping for the last two or three days. The “famine” part of my “feast or famine” sleep schedule, no doubt. Sigh.

Again, I think caffeine is a trigger. I had not had any for days, and thus, I am guessing, I was able to “dry out” and stop needing so much damned sleep. But last night, at Denny’s, I had my usual Diet Coke with my meal and whaddaya know, super sleepy day today.

I have decided to completely ignore the whole issue of being addicted to sleep or whether I need to sleep or just want to sleep for now. When I am sleepy, I will sleep. Period. I am confident that I will eventually reach a point where I am done sleeping and I couldn’t nap even if I wanted to nap.

That was how I felt on Thursday and Friday. Sure, maybe a few times, I might have wanted to escape reality by sleeping. But I couldn’t. I was just all out of real sleepiness. I could lay down for maybe an hour and a half and get to maybe the very lightest level of sleep and that was it.

So I was forced to actually deal with the day, and fill my time somehow. It did not, alas, result in me getting much that was useful done, but if I can keep pushing myself towards that state of mind, I am sure I will get bored enough with the usual fucking around to want to do something different.

And that is when I will, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, I will, as a last resort, do useful things besides writing on this here blog of mine.

Writing this thing is quite useful to me. It helps me keep my writing muscles toned, and it provides me with an outlet for my thoughts and feelings. I am still learning to harness the totality of what I need to express to the yoke of the written word, but in many ways, that is a writer’s life journey.

And seeing as I am pushing 40, I rather think it is time I got working on that whole writing thing in a serious and determined way.

Wah, not fun. But could lead to lots more fun, fun in the form of money. Yay money!

I have so much trouble focusing my energies! So afraid of having to make things real. That whole “not wanting to leave the safety of my skull” kind of thing. A real problem, that.

Reality has so much good stuff in it. And it makes you work so hard and do such scary tricky things to get the good stuff, too. Why can’t I just get it for being so darn special?

But nooo, they keep wanting me to do things, and doing things is hard. No fair!

Seriously though, I do want to exit this icy mire of inaction. But I have the sad feeling that I will have to bail out more of my backed up emotional sewage before that becomes any easier.

At least, that is the only way I know of to reduce the paralytic fear of reality that is the main thing holding me back. I can wank all over the place forever about other little sub-problems of my tempestuous and tormented mindscape, but all threads lead back to that main problem : fear of the world outside my head. (And fear of the world inside it, too. Like I said, it’s… complicated. )

But I am working on just plain accepting more of who I am, what I am, and where I am at this point in life. I am trying to teach myself to view my life as fun and lazy and self-indulgent and not too hard without totally tapping out of reality or becoming a completely worthless person.

But hey, even if I am never a bestselling author, I will have at least learned to enjoy my worthless existence more, and that is something to think about.

As I have said before, the whole self-loathing thing has not proved effective at propelling me towards stardom. I am not the sort of person whose inner demons make them ravenously ambitious and push them towards ever higher levels of achievement and success.

I hope to be that kind of person some day, honestly. But right now, my inner demons do not goad me so much as tie me down and sit on me and lock my head into one of those Clockwork Orange viewing chairs and convince me that there is nothing outside this sad little life of mine.

Or rather, that this sad little life of mine is all I am capable of achieving in life, and that I should be glad for it and not try for anything more, because I won’t get and I will just end up worse off than before and cursing myself for ever having tried.

Like I said : Complicated.

I get the feeling that if something happened that forced me to deal with reality, I would go through a profound crisis of the soul, but perhaps I would emerge from said crisis with a more stable and strong personality, illusions burned away, focus gained by trial by fire.

Or maybe my entire psyche would collapse, and I would become completely catatonic, and spend the rest of my life as a drooling vegetable in the back ward of some ill-funded loony bin, collecting bedsores and being casually abused by giant orderlies without even being mentally present enough to enjoy it.

But maybe that is not me talking, but those evilly persuasive demons of mind once more convincing me that there is only this life, and disaster.

I really hate those little fuckers.