Sleep Dep

Here's a friendly suggestion of awesomeness to play over the post, if you so feel (word of warning: it's not traditional music, so you may not like it the first listen... but give it time):



Truth be told, it's been quite some time since I've tried to update this blog, and even longer since I've actually posted. I suppose it has something to do with not feeling that I have anything worth saying before I have done something to back it up; if there's one thing that consistently that irks me, it's empty words.

So I haven't posted. But I've been doing a lot of doing. So that's cool.

I've learned a few things, too, in the vein of things that generally suck while you go through them, but somehow look back upon as growing times. Or maybe that's what your brain does to protect you from trauma-inducing experiences. Either way is fine with me, I think.

A Brief-ish Thought About Sleep Deprivation:

For a few months there, I was pulling twenty hour work shifts, hopping back and forth between two jobs. It was typical for me to see the sunset as I left my first job, only to watch it rise the next morning as I left the second. At first, I was ecstatic that I was able to work so much; most of the time I have a lingering guilt that clouds everything that I do that doesn't contribute to a paycheck. It prompted a certain adult freedom that I hadn't ever felt before. I began to seek out the early morning haunts that no one ever knows about: the all-night coffee places and open-way-too-early-in-the-morning pancake houses that only the rare patron greets at 5am. A french bakery that wafts welcoming waves of fresh-baked, honey-drenched croissant and french-pressed coffee air that is more than enough to get your salivary glands overworked anywhere within a two mile radius. A midnight diner that boasts mountains of sausage-gravy biscuits and cheese-enrobed scrambled eggs, with enough watery, burn-flavored coffee to drown the four-hundred-pound truckers and high-powered executives that were called to by name by the sugary-sweet waitress. I had discovered an unfamiliar culture that lurked in the uber-late and wicked-early. It existed in flashes of Hunter S. Thompson-esque surrealism, the product of an enthused exhaustion: shaking streetlights that trailed through the night, menacingly unending roads with beneficent streetlights, smiling waiters extending over-sized coffee pots and impractical advice, slow-moving passenger trains that came full of people and left empty, blurry menus of swedish omelets and mushroom sauces, dark stairways paved with astro-turf, loud non sequitur fireworks breaking the night's stillness, low-slung cars burning out tires and blaring subsonic bass.

This enthusiasm of discovery lasted approximately a month. Apparently sleep is somewhat functional, in that you don't function much without it. The evil of sleep-dep is subtle. There are the obvious side-effects: a perpetual hangover that affects everything that you do, the nodding off during intense situations, the forgetting parts of the day, the blurring of days into weeks into months. The obvious ones are easy to muscle through. Sheer will power. If you made it through finals in college, you've gotten this part mastered. It's the secondary effects that are way more devious and detrimental.

Here's the thing about sleep dep: it makes you tired of being tired. Infinite regression. Once you've begun the cycle, it becomes a spinning top of weariness that only increases its rotation, fueled by its own existence. It begins to erode your mind around the edges, numbing you to most things that were once sensitive. You begin to isolate yourself. Your interests shift from many to one primary goal: sleep. Future goals? Sleep. Long term plans? Sleep.

All other decisions are trivial.

Sleep dep is evil.

Needless to say, I quit my night job.