insomnia | Arch Heretic

Up at 2 a.m. spinning my brain through miles of random articles linked via twitter, missing the days of yore when I would obsessively read ancient thick recipe books in the wee hours. Twitter is a smorgasbord of brain candy, I love it, but I need something dulling my brain right now, not revving it up.

I’ve had strange obsessions with rules of social etiquette and table service since middle school. I’ve been reading recipe books since I was six years old, my favorite being my mother’s very thick book that included chapters on formal entertaining. I’ve also been obsessed with goods and services around the world since I saw my first maps in grade school. I was the kid who read encyclopedias growing up. I’m not sure the word prolific even touches this compulsion to absorb all the knowledge in the world. I’ve been aware of this reading compulsion for years. When I stand in vote lines I can’t help reading all the boring lengthy political charts tacked to the walls. I used to keep physics books in my bathroom.

For about four years I stopped reading. Stabbing occipital pain, blah blah, migraines, blah. I still get into fights with my left eye, but after I stomp on it a little I can usually force it to comply. My eye doctor seems to think there is nothing wrong with it.

Now I read twitter. I actually read it. I zip through a stack of incoming feeds and article links like a fly zipping around a picnic. I know everything going on around the world in real time. And you know what? For the first time in my life I’m starting to feel bored. Actually did a double take over feeling bored at 2:30 a.m. I never get bored. I have this glorious think tank jammed onto the top of my neck, I can’t turn the thing OFF. I’m bored???

I’m doing this with TV shows, too. Instead of being pulled into story, I seem to be on the edge watching for plot devices, and I seem to be disappointed a lot more lately with new shows than I ever was with the old ones, even if the filming is better. Maybe it’s true, maybe television rotted my brain.

I didn’t get to see supermoon at my house because of storms, and my horizon is such a tangle of woods that any kind of rise and set usually gets missed. Twitter showed me supermoon seen from all over the planet. I miss a lot of real life going on out there, but twitter jams real life from all over the world into my brain, and just since 2 a.m. I have read a number of lengthy articles on mental health, politics, cleaning tips, animal advocacy, and, you guessed it, food preparation and safety. One of the articles I skimmed insists that twitter helps strengthen the brain in the event of impending Alzheimer’s. I’m a little concerned that my brain can do a thousand squat thrusts by now.

I just wanna sleep….

I am *wide awake*. This is my third night without zyrtec after a month of pretty hard core (and doctor prescribed) dosing. Not even going into why, I’m sure people are sick of hearing about it on Twitter and in my Pinky Stuff.

You know how your coolest ideas hit you when it’s nearly impossible to get them written down, like in the shower or while you’re driving or in dreams? Besides keeping spirals scattered around my house and in my car, I have blogs scattered around the internet. My head is a really busy place. I’ve spent nearly thirty years not sleeping because my insomnia is so bad, and over the last nearly ten years I’ve been compiling millions of words into documents. I’ve had loads of practice now, and I can easily whittle ten thousand words down to a 140 character thought. If I ever time travel, I bet I wind up being Confucius.

Some people put quality time into gaming. I’m pretty jealous of them. I’ve tried several kinds of games to pass the long sleepless hours, usually a terrible mistake. Being an obsessive aspie with natural inclinations to addiction, I disappear for days and resurface all wobbly and shaky and disoriented to time and place. The disorientation happens all the time anyway, constantly getting my days mixed up and getting lost in Walmarts, but gaming is like techmeth and turns my brain inside out until I don’t exist in this dimension anymore. I was the first (and only so far) person to hashtag techmeth in English on twitter.

I’m into a different sort of gaming now, called social media. I broke through the glass ceiling on Klout yesterday with a 64. The average Klout Score hovers in the 40s, but if you can get 63 or over you are in the top 5% of social media influencers on Klout. Klout tracks pretty much anybody with a twitter account. My favorite authors on Klout have scores in the 80s, and Jessica Gottlieb has 78 right now. I have never for the life of me figured out why she followed me on Twitter, but I’m blown away that she does. I think it’s cool and I really appreciate it. Anyway, hope I can keep that score up! Takes work.

And I guess while I’m sidetracking I may as well throw in that Henry Winkler tweeted at me this week.

I tend to meander and free associate myself right off the page, so back to my original thought. I’m thinking that being super stoned on zyrtec for a month isn’t helping me get this manuscript ready for the publisher at all, and I may just have to put up with ragweed and autumn leaf mold oozing my eyeballs down my face (hashtag lifeinthewoods) while I stay awake and WORK. I’ve been getting double and even triple my usual sleep with the zyrtec, which you’d think would be heavenly after decades of insomnia, but my regular doctor isn’t happy at all that I’m a zombie and wants me to stop taking it and call my allergist.

So this is my brain right now sans zyrtec null