PISD - Post Insomnia Stress Disorder

I am impressed by insomniacs. After another night of doing a groaning, flatulent, fire-breathing battle with the agents of change inside of me, I am stumbling and bumbling around my house, with purple eye pouches, wearing too tight hoop sneakers (has my foot grown? are my toes swollen? how did I ever play ball in these?), dreading the climb of the sun up into my windows. A fucking horrible night, and yet, and yet, I'm actually mad on the rise, more energy than I've had since last Tuesday (still stumbly, bumbly and pebble-eyed, but grooving with it). It feels like I've been lying down too much, been too prone. My body doesn't like it. Things get trapped, gasses, liquids, thoughts. I could not find comfort last night. The heat was in me, and, worse, the ball of tension in the solar plexus, magma hot at the center and strangely cold on the edges, like Mars. My heart beat too fast, too long. It's supposed to go quiet at night, but this was heart work for running away, chasing, heroic effort, the fear of the Fall, the frustration of the failure of my body system. And I was mind writing through all of this, the turning over, the coughing, the hot sandpaper feeling of breathing the desert air which has become so dry over the past couple of weeks that my mouth and the top of my throat feel like they are being singed during the nights. Talking to myself, talking: "Chill. Relax. Breathe slowly. It's ok. It's ok. Fall back into yourself. Fall in. Cmon. Cmon. CMON! FUCK! Geeze. This fucking blows. What the fuck. What the fucking fuck!" Miserable. There were only two stints, maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour, when I fell away and dreamt. An old town, water towers, factories on a river. A group of people, friends, one guy in particular, tall with a white undershirt loose over jeans. He is wary of me, looking at me like once we were buddies but now he doesn't trust me. It's uncomfortable. I walk up a paved hill on a narrow street between buildings. It looks like Italy. Later, I'm in my Oyster Bay, with friends in a cab going to a bar. People mill in the street. We're happy to be there, just milling around, a lot of shadows from the street lights, a green sky. But I come back to my body and I'm still breathing fire and that goddamn ball of friction is still there. No change. I can't fall back in. It's 4:30 and I think of writing. I have it in me, but I just add that threat to the battle going on and turn on the radio instead to the BBC Report. They're talking about the King of Thailand punishing people, foreigners, sometimes being lenient, like with a Swiss man who was caught tagging his portrait, and somehow pleaded for mercy. Maybe because he's swiss and neutral? He was sentenced to 10 years, but the king reduced it to 6 months. Some other guy, a Turk, got 10 years for something I can't remember (spitting on someone?)and he's still in prison (maybe a makeup call for the infamous Turkish prisons immortalized in Midnight Express?). Fucking Vanity. And up next: the Taliban blowing up schools in Afghan towns where girls are attending and terrorizing the girls. Fucking reverse evolution! How is this species going to survive? Oh, and then they go into the worldwide economic meltdown, bank bailouts, etc., etc., followed by the fact that the US Army has had an amazing 15 months of recruiting due to the lack of jobs available. They've surpassed all quotas. Great, great, soldiers that's who we need more of so that we can go to places with weapons and kill people to make sure everything's alright because that's how the world works, and we live in a dangerous world, and there's a terrorist next door, and Osama bin Laden is still out there, and we have to spread democracy all over the world because it will allow people to get rich like us by being part of the vast network of smoothly operating capital markets? And why else? Liberty? Oh, and because of the war on drugs. So I had to shut off the radio and the waning moon was up there smearing the stars, and even that pissed me off because the Big Dipper is always right there in the first big window, my own personal dipper. But the moon's light fucked it up. And I'm rolling around talking to myself about the absurdity. Repeating things over and over, being absurd myself, wondering what it will take for fundamental change to occur. Breathing fire and repeating things in my bed at 5:06am, but underneath all of that thinking that with Obama coming in

- oh, and I forgot to mention earlier, another part of the BBC Report was how much money people are making selling products with the image of Obama...it is quite a phenomenon, get yours NOW! before they sell out! -

there is an opportunity for RADICAL change. I'm talking really getting/going green, no more torture, leading the world in kindnesses, waking up to putting our energy into community as opposed to consumption...you know, all the stuff, healing ourselves, the earth, universal health care, good, wild education, experimentation, supporting artists, tribalism. And I get excited, for a second. But at the same time I can feel a gremlin inside of me ready to pounce on Obama for not being the change he's been waiting for. Hey, but I hardly slept, remember, so the world has some sinister edges, you know. Ahhh, but not really. The truth is, I am inspired whether O is the man or not or somewhere in the blah, blah middle. In fact, I felt in my grains a while back that government as we know it is anachronistic, and at this point, stunts the evolution of man. Maybe Obama feels the same? I'm not advocating overthrow, having pizza with anarchy parties at my house, I'm just saying that we all need to grow from the inside out, reach to each other from the inside out, mingle and create with the people around us, including the earth, stop the fucking vanity about we are this and we are that (the days of johnny jingo are over!), and we deserve this and we deserve that, and we're the fucking best man...if I hear another person start to talk with the sentence, "America is the greatest country in the world" I'm going to throw a fucking dart at the radio. What does that mean? And who determines this? Is it based on Ms. World? I don't think we've won that in a while. Is it based on education? Sorry. Is it based on manufacturing? Woops. Is it based on principles? Hmmm, tough one if you read a book or two. Why isn't Sweden the best country in the world? Or Morocco? It's all ridiculous. There was a time when it was important for the development of the world to have nation states and war was a part of that system. We're beyond the usefulness of this system. Man, you can get mired in this stuff, huh? I'm in a wormhole with it. But, again, I'm optimistic and hoping to be part of the fun of rallying with everybody to do things like share, and prop each other up, and dance, and grow food, drive cars that spit water, and even more radical stuff like forgive people and, if we have to be a unit of example at all, let's be for sharing all the wealth (with ourselves and the entire world) and not worrying what anachronistic political label that is associated with. Alright, I may just be awake enough to wring out the last drops of sarcasm laced with the gooey aortic blood of the eternal optimist.