This Is Not a Funny Post

(Photo from American Academy of Orofacial Pain)

My absolute biggest fear is cicadas. But my second biggest fear is of being wrongly convicted of a capital crime, spending 20 years locked up in prison and working my way through the appeals process before finally being executed at the hands of the government which I have worshipped, in spite of its utterly flawed and broken state, since I was 10. I'm feverishly scribbling this at 12:30 in the morning with an alarm clock on the nightstand rapidly ticking toward it's 6:00 a.m. call time, so when I say this is the sort of thing that can keep me up nights, I'm not exaggerating. (Quick confession. Though I wasn't making up the bit about being kept up nights, I was fabricating the alarm. It's 2011. I use my cell phone to get up. It doesn't tick in the same kind of impending doom way I needed to set the scene though.) I accept that this fear of mine is unlikely, but I won't say it's irrational. Since 1973, 130 people have been released from death row based on wrongful convictions. You could say that this is proof that the system works. You could also be realistic for a minute and admit that probably some innocent people have been executed in the name of justice.
     Enough of this soapbox though. Let's get back to important matters. Let's get back to ME. Since I was a little girl, no one has ever seen me sleep. My girlfriend who has slept next to me almost every night for the last 3 1/2 years has never seen me sleep. This isn't to say I have not slept in the company of others. I've shared beds with my best guy friends in State College, Pa; Savannah, GA; Columbus, OH; and Gatlinburg, TN. I've crashed living room floors with Tim and Susan. But I'm careful, and I'm a light sleeper. The second my bed or living room floor mate turns over or stretches or yawns or unconsciously scratches his or her stomach, I'm up. I open my eyes, I turn over too, or I say, "Hey there." I do whatever it takes to send the message, hey you, no funny business. No sticking my hand in warm water or writing the word "idiot" on my forehead with a permanent marker or whatever it is that awake people do to asleep people when they're not vigilant. I'm onto you, mother-fucker. Seriously, what is it that people do? Someone tell me so maybe I can conquer this fear.
     For whatever reason, this is something I've been thinking a lot about today. I don't know why, but it suddenly dawned on me that, unless I meet some sort of Wile E. Coyote cartoon demise or I'm shot in the head because I flip the wrong person the bird for cutting me off on the highway, I'm not going to escape this life without someone seeing me sleep. Death, when it's drawn out, like it will be for most of us (come on asteroid the size of Texas), is not pretty. It's days, if not weeks or months, in hospital beds with doctors and nurses coming to poke at you at all hours. Loved ones sitting by your side, involuntarily measuring the time between your breaths.
     If you're on death row, people waiting for you to die is your whole life, not just the last few sick days. It's years, maybe even decades, of people watching and waiting for you to take your last breath. No, literally, in the end there are people in a gallery behind a pane of glass, eager and waiting to see you fall into permanent sleep, so that maybe, finally, they can rest. How does this not freak anyone else out?
     Whatever the cause of my inevitable death, whether it's cancer or conviction, at some point I'm either going to have to get over my fear of people watching me sleep or else come to terms with dying of exhaustion.   

I'm Always Tired, and You Should Be Too

I haven't consistently slept well since autumn 1980. I was a fetus, and for two blessed months, life was good.
     According to Science Daily and, you know, scientists, after about 7 months in the womb, fetuses spend most of their time sleeping. For me, this is easy enough to understand for two reasons. One, if I don't have something mentally (say an intense political debate with a libertarian) or physically (say running away from a cicada) stimulating happening to me for 45 consecutive seconds, I get bored. As a fetus, once you've counted all the ceiling tiles 1000 or so times and mastered every yoga position that the space your stuck in allows, you're bound to want to escape to dreamland. Two, it would take me 7 months to adapt to and block out the ceaseless cacophony of my mother's beating heart, growling stomach, and echoing external conversations ringing in my ears. (Yes, I know fetuses can't hear right off the bat, but this is not a science article.) If you think about it, the stream of noise that fetuses are subjected to for weeks on end probably violate some of the anti-torture regulations of the Geneva Conventions. Boredom or no, it would take me 7 months to get to a place where I could sleep, but once I could fall asleep, I think I'd want to go ahead and ride it out.
     After birth (not to be confused with afterbirth) I found no shortage of reasons not to fall asleep, not to stay asleep, and to wake up 15 minutes before the alarm went off every single time. The same explanation can be given for all three scenarios. Unlike so many of my fellow humans, my sleeping brain never evolved beyond the Pleistocene. As far as I'm concerned, a saber-toothed cat could come barging into my den at any moment, and I'd damn-well better be prepared. As far as my prehistoric brain knows, every sound, the flushing of a toilet, a 3:00 a.m. clap of thunder, an alarm clock sounding, could mean death. Constant vigilance is required.
     In addition to these perfectly logical, completely involuntary reasons not to sleep well, other more far-fetched yet doubly terrifying reasons were given to me by sadistic film makers and trusted teachers. My 8th grade science teacher, Mr. Bruns (who always had chalk on his crotch) showed us the 1983 made-for-tv classic, The Day After. I've mentioned this before. The film is about life in Kansas City, Missouri in the days and weeks following a nuclear holocaust. If the image of Steve Guttenberg's face rotting off due to radiation exposure hadn't been enough to keep me up nights, Mr. Bruns soothing words, "The crazy thing about this movie is that this could really happen," were. Forget the fact that I'd seen the Berlin Wall come down with my own eyes five years earlier, and the USSR had dissolved 3 years prior. The Cold War raged on and Russia still had nukes pointed right at my bedroom, and I knew it.  To make matters worse, I grew up a few miles south of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and every time a cargo plane flew over, which was several times nightly, the words that ran through my head were, "Oh my God. This is it."
     If fear of prehistoric feline attack or the end of the world aren't enough to keep you up nights, how about the possible death of a loved one? I don't know how old I was when I figured out that "everyone you know, someday, will die," but once I grasped this concept, it stuck with me.
     

For several years before I was born, my parents owned an Australian Terrier named Barney. By the time I was born, he was in his prime. By the time I was 4, I realized he, my best friend, would die. By the time I was 9, I would stay awake nights just to watch him breathe. I'm not sure what I would have done had the poor deaf, blind, and hairless 15-year-old mass of perfection stopped breathing, but, at the very least, I was more than prepared to collapse into heap of sobbing hysterics when the inevitable happened. I do this with humans too. I was lying in bed, trying to get a couple hours of sleep before returning to Hospice when I got the call that my grandfather had died. I hadn't actually been asleep, of course, because of the nagging fear that an unexpected and jarring predator in the form of my phone's ringtone could sound at any minute. Still, when the sound came, I was startled. My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest. Then, when my mother's words finally made sense, I wished it would.

     Who could sleep knowing that you're likely to wake up to feline attack, nuclear holocaust, or the death of a loved one? Doesn't 90 or so years of complete and utter exhaustion seem like a small price to pay to prevent so much pain? Pour yourself a cup of coffe and quit your whining.  

      

Aww. Is Someone Feeling Sorry for Herself?

I've come to this page ten or so times tonight with every intention to write about, I don't know what. It just occurred to me that the title of my blog is "Disconnect." As in a lack of connection; a disparity. Funny seeing as how the reason I write the thing is so that I might feel a connection to something, which brings me back to why I've come to this page ten times tonight. I'm feeling a bit raw. A bit like I'd like to be in the fetal position. A bit like fucking, because, let's face it, isn't that everyone's favorite coping mechanism?

My mother is asleep on my couch. She has an appointment with her neurologist tomorrow. Next to me is a list of things we need to talk to the neurologist about:

1. White outs, because when she wakes up every morning, she can't see for about five minutes
2. Balance, because she's like a walking pinball
3. Cataract surgery, because, if nothing else, at least now she can see what she's stumbling into, unless, of course, it's less than five minutes after she's gotten up
4. Passing out, because apparently she blacked out last night and laid in the middle of the
living room yelling for my sister, who could sleep through a tornado, to come and help her
5. Need to change migraine medicine, because, the one thing we've found in ten years to help
her headaches causes severe breathing problems
6. After a bad migraine, balance issue seems to get worse, because, maybe it isn't just an
expression. What if her head really does explode?
7. Refill Percocet, because if you can't see and you keep falling over, you may as well be high.

"You know, I was thinking, there could be something really wrong with me," my mom said five minutes before she fell asleep. "I was thinking that as I was driving up here."

"Yeah, I was thinking that too," I said. I forgot to say, it's all I think about. Well, that and the fact that I'm graduating in two weeks and I have no money and no job. And how I haven't slept in a month. And, and, and, well, you can see how fucking is better.

Waiting for the Sky to Fall

When I was little, the thing they told kids about tornadoes was, "they sound like a train." I didn't question what seemed like an absolute, so every time I heard a train whistle in the distance, I shit my pants a little.

When I was in the eighth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Bruns, showed my class a horrible made-for-t.v. movie called, The Day After. It was an uplifting little film about nuclear holocaust. Here's what I remember about that movie, after all the bombs went off, people started drinking well water without realizing that it was loaded with radioactive deliciousness. Someone had the unfortunate experience of being outside at the time of the explosion and was instantly blinded. Some man sat on an overturned cow carcass with a shotgun and blew anyone's brain's out who came near what was, presumably, the man's only food source. Steve Gutenberg, of Three Men and a Baby fame, got stir crazy and went outside, then, after a few days, his skin started rotting off. A few days after the explosion, a disgusting looking Gutenberg hobbled to the hospital to find it packed to the gills with people in varying degrees of gamma-ray-induced decay. A baby was born to symbolize hope. Jason Robards (an older, now dead, actor) went looking for his family, and when he got to where his house should have been, he just crumbled in a heap of despair and waited for flesh-eating death to take him away. After the movie, Mr. Bruns emphasized two things. First, the shit in these bombs has a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, if one ever goes off, even if you survive the initial blast, which you won't, you can never go outside again for the rest of your life or your flesh will rot off, begging the question, how many packets of Ramen Noodles should I buy to get through the next 80 years. Second, "this could totally happen. Right now, Russia has dozens of Nucs pointed right at us." The Cold War was over by this points, but I didn't sleep for five years. I grew up close to an air force base, and every time a cargo plane flew over my house, I thought the end had come.

There's a satellite falling out of the sky. It's expected to crash sometime in late February or early March. We're not to worry. In the past five years, 328 satellites have fallen out of the sky, and no one has been hurt. After all, the earth is mostly water. In the unlikely event that there is damage or injury, the government is fully prepared to offer some monetary compensation to the victim(s). At four-in-the-morning a few nights ago, when I was sleeping as deeply as I ever do, which is not deeply at all, a window rattling clap of thunder startled me and my heart nearly to death. My first disoriented thought was, the satellite has come early, and it's landed on the White Castle across the street.

Last night I dreamed that I was on a plane that crashed. No big deal, we were only hovering about ten feet from the surface of the ocean when we went down, and we landed on a sandbar. It was really more an inconvenience than anything else. As we switched planes and the young pilot responsible apologized for the mishap then took his seat in the new cockpit I turned to the flight attendant next to me and asked, "are they really going to let this guy fly this plane too?"

"Not to worry," she said, "he just gets it off the ground. Then the real pilot takes over from there." Apparently getting off the ground is the easy part.

Can't Sleep. Guilt Will Eat Me

I miss my grandfather. The man's been dead for over a year. One year one hundred and sixteen days, to be exact. Forgive the large chunks of exposition, but my grandfather's death and the impact it has had on my psyche are things I've written about before, so I'm not going into it here. What I will say is, I had a dream about him last night. In said dream, my grandfather calls me from his death bed. "Where the hell ya been?" he says, "I haven't seen you in a month. I don't think I've got much time left here." Let the record show, I saw my grandfather the day before he died. In his last hours of lucidity. I also saw him the day he died; he was in a coma, but I sat there with him. Stroking his hand. Running my fingers through his hair. Telling him I loved him. What I'm saying is, this dream was not a re-enactment of events that actually transpired. Well, next in my dream, I drive to my grandparents' house, but it's too late. My grandfather is already dead. Next the dream turned into one involving sex with someone who I will not mention. The kind of sex that I really desperately need to believe was something highly symbolic and not at all literal. (No, not with my grandfather, though that seems the obvious conclusion to be made here.)  I woke up feeling dirty and no further along in the grieving process than I was the day after my grandfather died. WHAT THE FUCK!? I'm not one for CAPS LOCK or dramatic use of punctuation, but for Christ's sake. My mother has dreams about my grandfather all the time. They're lovely dreams in which they're simply spending time together. She wakes up thankful for the impromptu visit. Why can't I have a dream like that. One where we're golfing, or playing gin? It's the kind of shit that makes me miss my insomnia.