Occasionally, a young, green, wet-behind-the-axons, an eager junior nerve ending is thrown into the fight, only to be made cynical and bitter the veteran funiculi in its weary fascicle.
Real insomnia is a relationship wrecker, it’s a straight road to madness, it’s a hallucinogen, it’s a soul sapper. So, where’s the fun side?
I sleep about two hours a night from 4am until 6am if I’m lucky. On a Saturday or Sunday I nap from 1pm until 5pm just to get some sleep. It’s been this way for a year now. I’ve tried no end of helpful suggestions from lovely people with my best interests in their hearts.
These pieces of advice have included and still include again and again: heavy drinking, mindfulness, more exercise, dog walking, meditation, cannabis infused butter, smoking good quality weed, giving up smoking, giving up drinking, audiobooks, blind folds, magic bean filled “hot boots”.
I have to report that every single one bar one of those cures proved to be, at best, of short term effect (booze!) or utter nonsense. The efficacious pair resulted in day-destroying hangovers. The outlier, the one that makes me feel less like beating my head on a rock just for some eternal rest, well I wasn’t expecting it. We’ll get to it soon.
Also thrown into the bargain were people saying thoughtful and encouraging such gems as:
“I’d love to have all those extra hours”
“You must get loads done”
“Sleep’s just wasted hours anyway”
“Have you tried crystals?”
When you have next to zero sleep on a regular basis, you can’t concentrate on anything, let alone anything productive. Seeing 03:58am again and again and again, when you’re not on the Night Bus, or beneath the Eiffel Tower, or in the air looking down on Sydney, Australia.
Seeing 03:58am without being anywhere interesting except your own head is not a capital B, capital T Bad Thing. It is a shattering, continuing reminder that you’re alone, in the dark at the mercy of yourself.
What’s yours?
My insomnia derives its hellish existence from a mixture of physical pain and mental shenanigans.
The former is due to a combination of two very waring physical changes that occurred decades apart. Also involved, well maybe, is a strange waterborne infection I picked up as a very small boy paddling in a shallow pool in a public park in Southampton, a town I took against forever after, but I digress. Insomnia does that to you.
The second cause is neuropathy, better known to fans of horror films more than medical dramas as ‘nerve damage’ and then ‘massive nerve damage. My neuropathy is due to my Type 2 Diabetes, which was diagnosed at least two years too late to save me from that massive nerve damage (I hyperbolise because that’s what needed at times like these).
My diabetes is now well under control, in fact I’m now technically only pre-diabetic. However, the massive nerve damage is here to stay.
Look I’ll come clean. It’s not just the diabetes, it’s probably also 40 years of almost constant booze taking (I had a year off in 1986 due to pissing blood… turns out that was a kidney stone).
I’d imagine (I’ve been told by people who know) that 40 years of heavy, heavy smoking might have something to do with it. I’m talking French Gitanes, American Marlboro Reds, Sobranie Black Russians, roll-ups, butt rescues and more disgustingly, morbidly, suicidally pleasurable inhalations plus Thunderbird wine, paddy whiskey and red lemonade, and Guinness, and you get the idea. The ’80s were a blast.
Neuropathetique
My particular form of neuropathy uses my feet as its natural battleground. It wages and has waged an uncivil, guerrilla war on my small blood vessels, the ones that supply life to my nerve endings. That’s where it’s not destroyed those nerve endings totally, it has reduced them to demented, uncommunicative body weeds.
They fire off as and when they feel like it with absolutely no deference to what is actually required of them.
Some nights my right foot is not only on fire, it is also – and at random frequencies both in time and in size – shoot tiny electrical shots up or down or in or apparently outside my leg.
On other nights my left foot will feel like it’s not only soaking wet, but it’s also freezing cold.
Drift off to sleep and out of the pedal-undergrowth emerge the remnants of a once proud and highly trained set of nerve endings. I imagine them a rag-tag squad of shell-shocked, bewildered and hate filled veterans with stained and torn epineurium.
Occasionally, a young, green, wet-behind-the-axon, eager junior nerve-ending is thrown into the fight, only to be made cynical and bitter by the veteran funiculi in their weary fascicle.
Madness, they call it Madness
As drowsiness gives way to full, deep, enriching, nuturing, deathly beautiful sleep: the assault of nerve-shredded madness starts with a sniper in the distant upland of the big toe. And then: Boom! Zing! Peeee-owww! Fzzzzzt!!! Half a minute of tiny, teeny, deeply penetrative, icy, fiery torture begins.
It’s started to attack my spine somehow. Probably some kind of bastardly psychosomatic sympathetic mind/body fuckery.
The mental or psychologic aspects of my insomnia are baseborn psychopaths. It’s self-sabotage on a Charge of the Light Brigade scale. My own brain has some exquisitely unpleasant tricks, some real mindbending nastiness. My least favourite came slowly but is now an ever-present. It’s a deep anxiety, and consequent adrenaline flood, as the time clicks past 7pm and the night begins to come in. Night means insomnia and loneliness as all my household compadres go to bed, and are soon asleep.
Night means trying to read, trying to watch or listen to or feel anything makes the time pass, that relaxes but doesn’t stimulate brain or body. Stimulation is fatal to sleep. It spooks it so that sleep runs for cover, hiding itself. It sends out its with the charlatan of ‘napping’ or the confidence trickster of the drowse.
Night means stuffing your head into a pillow on the couch downstairs to stifle the occasional and involuntary sobs of frustration and loneliness so they don’t wake anybody else in the house. Occasionally there I hear cries of pain coming out of me.
As for Sleep Cycles and Circadian Rhythms and those marvellous events that are legends and epic poems spoken only in whispers by me people, by which I mean me because, as all my Insomniac comrades know: I am the only one in my timezone who is awake. I have never felt so lonely and meaningless.
Fun! Look away now
Earlier in this piece I mentioned fun. By this I mean that I have discovered something new. This he to help me through the dead, empty hours between 02:00 and 05:45 when my wife and dog wake up.
In 1977 in rural Hampshire I discovered Punk rock music, cheap cider, fags stolen from my mum. I was kissed with tongues by a girl called Helen. I played a lot of cricket but my commitment began to wane into a useless past. All pasts are insignificant to teenagers, and rightly so.
That’s context you see, it’s important for the creation of bathos, and what’s coming next is bathetic to say the least.
Knocked it out of the park
About six years ago I fell for baseball, a sport I had never thought before about in my English/Australian lives. Why? It started with annoyance at myself of course.
I was laying in the darkness hoping for either death or breakfast. YouTube was randomising and I heard what sounded like code. I drifted off to sleep and back again, the game was still going on. This happened a few times and made the code even more enticingly impenetrable, so much so that I found myself watching old clips of the Metsies to help me sleep.
This was the code I heard (or close to it) before I drifted off.
“Conforto hits into 1-4-3 double play but advances Nimmo to third or a possible suicide squeeze. Here comes the Polar Bear to the plate. Pete’s is currently slashing 315.300.399 so we can expect a bomb.”
What in the living hell (that I was in) could this possibly mean? Bombs? Suicide? Polar Bears? I was ignorant and therefore I had to decipher all it. I don’t know why either: nerdery?
The sound of a baseball crowd on a drowsy July afternoon is my background white noise now. Commentary, smooth, biased, gentle bleeds in and out as I drift around sleep.
I fell specifically for a ‘franchise’ called the New York Mets. Perennially mid-table, a bit mediocre just like me.
Formed in 1962, so around my age, I chose The Mets because because I only knew that about them. I’ve visited New York. I liked it, I still like it. Unlike LA or Atlanta or any of the other places in the States I also visited but have never taken too.
I like it even more now that Mr Mamdani is to be mayor.
The Mets are famously, and aside from a few very exceptional years, not really very good. They show great promise… again and again and again. Millions of dollars available to the Mets and they’re just mediocre. It took me five seasons before I realised this. I love them for it.
As the legendary New York journalist, Jimmy Breslin, once wrote:
“You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t manoeuvre himself to lunch with the boss enough.
Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year
It could have been kites
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting baseball as a panacea for insomnia. Certainly not. I struck lucky finding a way to relax, if not to sleep, by learning an entirely new thing with your eyes closed and your muscles relaxing. It distracts from the electric shocks, the dread and fear, the sobbing and self-doubt that insomnia brings.
