THE GIFT OF INSOMNIA

Normally when I wake up and it's dark outside it's the biggest drag ever.

I've been doing this since I was a little kid and it's why I totally understand those references to the Dark Night of Soul, because when I wake up in the dark, in those too early hours to even call your friends who live three hours ahead of you, I tend to engage in catastrophic thinking. It's not like the waking up when you have to pee and your body take you on auto-pilot to the bathroom and then you crawl back in bed and resume sleep. This is an awake that is totally alert as if someone flipped a switch and the brain turned on.

And it's dark.

And I'm awake.

So after I lay there and toss and turn and try to force somnolescence to come back I usually start to think thoughts. Thoughts about how weird it is that I'm in this physical body that I seemingly have no control over sometimes and how life is strange and what's going to happen to me and this isn't at all how I thought things would turn out, you know, that I would be laying in the dark in some random apartment in Los Angeles wondering what the hell it's all about and what is that noise? What really goes on in the alley behind the building when I'm asleep because there's a lot of activity out there in the dark.

I stress out a lot about how I'm going to have to get up and function in a few hours and make it through a whole day on about 4 hours of sleep and then I stress out about how they say that stress and a lack of sleep makes you fat and I wonder if I should get up and go for a walk since I'm awake, but it's freaking dark out there and there are noises and I don't feel like getting dressed. If I lived in a neighborhood where I felt safe getting up and putting and walking around in my bathrobe I would probably stress less about the whole getting fat thing.

Anyway, this morning? When my eyes flew open at 4 o'something, my first thought was shitfuckgoddamn, but then I remembered something! I turned and pulled the curtains back and there it was - a full lunar eclipse in progress. About half the moon was covered by a black disk of shadow and the moon seemed all that much brighter by contrast. I had to put my glasses on to see how crisp the shape actually was and I laid there and watch the moon emerge from the darkness as it set in the western sky.

It was so incredibly cool and this morning I was truly grateful for that fucking bitch Insomnia.