Dienstag, 27. Nov 2007, 13:14

just finished watching… and am now immediately watching again… a personal-essay/documentary video by Alan Berliner about his insomnia… called wide awake.

OK… i feel compelled to make a mandatory music tie in before going on… he closes this piece about his insomnia with Who Needs Sleep? by the Barenaked Ladies. i'm no great fan of this band, tho i kinda didn't hate that big radio hit they had… whatever it was… as much as i felt like i should have.

but never heard this 'who needs sleep?' song before. and funny thing is, felt exactly the same kinda things as i had about whatever that hit was that i can't recall. it seemed very clever lyrically and like it should have been appealling in its bouncy poppy way. but it hits some internal wall - just like that other one - and it sounds too … too… ?? too what?

it sounds too automatic or too pat or too clever by half or… don't know exactly too what. but i can't bring myself to exactly like it, even though it sounds like it should be appealling. i have this reaction to a certain kind of 'radio-friendly' pop sometimes… but not others. sometimes i find really stupid mainstream factory-designed pop songs really appealling right away. but usually in those cases, suddenly the appeal wears off and i find myself wondering what i was ever thinking that i could have found something enjoyable in listening to THAT.

anyway.

alan berliner. wide awake. insomnia. i have been insomniac off and on since – well, at least since high school. i remember one night in late jr. high or early high school i picked up a copy of "the annotated alice" version of alice in wonderland/through the looking glass and ended up staying up almost until dawn reading both books and many annotations.

i had one of those autistic-like episodes where i was so rapt in the book that i had NO idea how late it was - how early it was. and so i grabbed an hour or hour or hour and a half of sleep and went to school.

it was a revelation. i did OK. the world didn't grind to a halt - i didn't grind to a halt. it was thrilling. it was a secret rebellion, a way to give the finger to what everyone expected of normal people in the world. i learned to listen to late night radio on the local public radio station (more music tie ins - discovered brian eno, was exposed to velvet underground, iggy pop, and all kinds of other music…) among other shows i listened to through midnight to the early hours - and not so early hours - of the night was the Ellis Dee show. they'd play clips of Spiro Agnew, too. Can still here him ranting about the nattering nabobs of negativism, about the elite group of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

anyway. i found out that there was magic at night. i remember hearing traffic far away on the highway and wondering what people were doing out driving around late at night…. where were they going? what kinds of lives did people have that they had someplace to drive to at 3.30 in the morning.

and i remember shortly after getting my driver's license i had a meeting to go to - it was a totally stupid meeting but a friend talked me into it as a goof. it was an 'explorer scout' - for kids getting too old for boy scouts - meeting. their focus was - of all fucking things - law enforcement. a bunch of teenagers who already wanted to be cops. it wasn't as funny as my friend and i had hoped.

hey! another unexpected music tie-in. that meeting somehow led to my getting to know this guy - clay chronister i think his name was - who was in his late teens and living in his own place. we'd met him somewhere else but since we were out at night and not far from where he said he lived, we cut out on the scouts and went over there instead.

driving to his place in the dark, at night, unaccounted for and kinda off the grid - it was a heady kind of freedom. at his house he played me Stiff Little Fingers for the first time, and dwight twilley and some fucking dub reggae and some art bears and raspberries and PiL god knows what else.

my first exposure to a true-blue music freak. he was SO excited to have a kid like me over who was just twigging to the staggering enormity of fantastic things to do to your ears that he kept popping records on and off the turntable and halfway through a song going 'OH MY GOD wait wait wait wait' and scrambling off to find some other barely related song that this song made him think of.

this was to become an annoying habit of my own later in life. the only way i've stopped doing this to people is to stop sharing music with them at my house. i began with compilations of wildly disparate artists and work on cassette tapes, and now CDs. I hand them over and walk away. i can't stand being there as someone listens to something new that i've given them if i can't jump up and down about it and talk and discuss and flip to the next thing it makes me think of. i couldn't moderate this totally annoying tic, so i just have had to go cold turkey.

but wide awake. yes. alan berliner. he talks about the rush of joy in the personal liberty and rebellion in insomnia - ascribes a quote about this to some philosopher in fact.

he talks about feeling tired all the time, too. and i've been tired for sooo long. years now. it seems like i used to be able to make it, but having a son who sleeps fairly regularly (THANKS BE!) and is up at 7 or 7.30 every day for the last ten years has really screwed my sleep-pooch.

i wouldn't wish bad sleeping habits on him or trade his welfare - much less his existence, natch - for anything - especially just so i could feel less tired.

but i do wish i could be more well sleep adjusted so that i could be more routinely ON when he was awake, and have lower emotional motility, etc. be a better and more fun and more productive dad.

instead, the night has lost some of its lustre and magic. i still spend too many awake with two, three or zero hours of sleep. but the trouble now is that i don't spend that time productively any more. i'm tired at night, too, too often. used to be i'd come awake at nine or ten and have a solid seven and sometimes eight hours of fecund productive time. but now it's often as blurry as the mornings have always been.

(yes, i try to practice all the good sleep hygiene stuff, but facts are facts. i fall asleep more reliably on stimulants than without - a cup of coffee at night relaxes me… and i'm diagnosed ADHD and when i take my adderol i feel much calmer during the day and sleep much more soundly at night than when i don't. plus, whether it's music or television or whatever, i think i fall asleep much more reliably with a low-level burble of that kind of sound - not white noise, but low voices or quiet music - than in silence. in silence my thoughts can race, i can hear my tintinus, i can hear my pulse… etc.)

uh…. well. it's just after noon and i'm tired. not sleepy, but tired. and i reckon i'll be tired til i nod off tonight. which will probably be be at about 4 o'clock or so, if the last few nights are any guide.

cheers, and thanks for listening.