All my life, or at least as long as I can remember, I’ve had an odd relationship with sleep. When I was in single digits, I would curl up anywhere I damn well pleased to catch a nap. As I got older, and my mind got clouded with real-world thoughts, I found myself turning into a bit of a night owl. By the time I reached high school, I was a straight up insomniac. You may notice my Twitter handle is two35am; this was a result of being up late at night, trying to think of a new AIM screen name*, but finding everything I tried already taken, so I just entered the current time.
*I have since abandoned using “two35am” as a chat handle; too often have I been confused for an Asian gay male couple in their mid-thirties and I got tired of explaining in chat rooms that I was, indeed, 15 and not lecherous chicken hawks pretending to be in high school.
It was in the wee hours of the morning my freshman year in high school that I started blogging and teaching myself HTML, CSS, and web design. During the day, I was more or less useless, trudging along through my classes barely able to focus. It was usually around 9pm that my brain-clock chimed and I woke up, despite usually having been awake for 14 or 15 hours already. I would get all these ideas: images and words colliding in my skull like infants squabbling for attention.
I couldn’t just lie there. I had to birth the brain babies.
Our computer lived in the den, which was for all intended purposes, my dad’s room (I always found this a poor choice of location, given that it took me about three years of patient hand holding before my dad even learned to turn the damn thing on). The path from my bedroom, situated almost exactly at the other end of the house, was perilous. First, I would have to sneak past my brother’s room, which was rarely a problem unless he was up late too, but he was a senior and I was a freshman so the door to his room was never, and I mean never, open. Crossing the terrace overlooking the foyer I would pass my parents’ room. This was the hard part. Dad snored, mom was a light sleeper, and they always left the door open for air flow on warm nights. Given my childhood home was a stone’s throw from the edge of Mt. Diablo’s summit, there were quite a few warm nights to deal with. Heading down the stairs, I’d reach the den door, which my dad always closed tight, but never locked. From the den door, looking up, I was able to see into my parents room through the banister, and should either of them get up to use the restroom or get a glass of water, I would be caught in plain view. Opening the den door rarely went smoothly, as the frame was a bit off and the rug a bit bunched under the hinges, making it a task to open at all, much less quietly. Practice made perfect though, and over time I learned the sweet spots to press and pull and push to get the door open quietly and quickly without disturbing my sleeping family upstairs.
Those days, we had a family AOL account (Remember those? When they were still cool? Starting to feel old.) Logging on took ages, and that distinctive sound made by our 56k dial-up modem was, shall we say, less than discrete. But eventually I was connected and I would let the creative process begin.
I would read blogs, perused forums, poked my head in chat rooms, and for the most part wasted a lot of time. But I would write, sometimes complete works of fiction ripped from the brain-womb and okay, I really need a less vaginal metaphor… ripped from the enclaves of my imagination and, being the 13 year old barely closeted gay boy I was, usually resulted in some kind of sexual and/or romantic fantasy. These stories never went anywhere except to my trusty floppy disk, but I would also head on over to the only repository for erotica known to me at the time for some decent, uh, inspirational reading material. I would be in the den for hours, practically all night, peeking into this new “Internet” thing and generally being naughty, going back up to bed moments before dawn broke. If I was lucky, I could get a whole two hours of light sleep in before my mom rapped on my door to wake me for school.
I don’t recall exactly when or how, but sometime towards the end of my freshman year I got my hands on a copy of Photoshop, and that’s where the fun really began. I designed websites for myself like a fiend, generally throwing a completely new design up every week. Fuck content, I was all about style. I think I had an About Me, some pictures, and an infrequently updated blog (some things never change) but that was it. But I had gorgeous headers, menus, colors, the works. I taught myself HTML in these days, hand-coding everything not out of lack of resources like EZ-HTML editors and blogging tools, but to keep myself knowledgeable and give my hands muscle memory as I typed, much like a piano player practices over and over and over, even if they already know how to play the song and play it well.
Skipping forward a few years to when I was beginning my senior year, all the late nights were really getting to me, so I sought aid. I went to the doctor, who referred me to a therapist, who prescribed me Paxil and some sleeping pills I forget the name of. She wanted me to get out of my head, let my body do what my body needed to do, and rest. I was on the Paxil for a few months, but it left me feeling numb, zombie-esque, and those brain babies kept on a-kickin’. I only used the sleeping pills for a bout a week because they didn’t work at all. Well, I suppose they sorta worked, but only in extremes and never a happy medium. I would either get really, really, really tired but still could not fall asleep, or I would be out like a light for 21 consecutive hours. When my mom spent an hour trying to wake me up, unsuccessfully (I was unconscious so I don’t specifically recall, but I believe several glasses of cold water were involved; otherwise the story is much more embarrassing than I thought) we mutually agreed that medication was not the solution.
So, what was the solution? I was getting ready for college, which would have its share of late nights for sure, and I needed to sleep. I hated sleeping during the day, but my mind was too active at night. Eventually, and quite unintentionally, the perfect solution happened upon me: a job.
After my first semester at Sonoma State, a lovely if a tad too rural school for my tastes, I moved back in with my parents, took a semester off while my paperwork and everything transferred to San Francisco State, and found myself a tad bored. My parents gave my brother and I each a stipend, if you will, while we were in school to go towards rent, food, fun, whatever. However, living in the dorms at Sonoma State and finding an apartment in San Francisco were two very different financial obligations, and my parents were not willing to give me more money than they gave my brother just because I wanted different things. For better or for worse, they raised us as equals and neither got something the other didn’t if at all avoidable. If I wanted to live in San Francisco, I had to earn the difference myself. So I hit the pavement on my semester-long sabbatical, 18 years and a few months old, seeing who will hire me. I landed the first and only interview I got, a chain restaurant in the Castro, and so my career began.
Now that I was working at night, getting off work around 11pm and driving all the way from San Francisco back to my parents’ house 35 miles away in Concord, I learned what it meant to be tired. I discovered that once you get on the Bay Bridge, if I stayed in the rightmost lane, I didn’t need to change lanes once, only choose to take or not take exits that branched off, all the way from the Embarcadero to my parents’ driveway. It was a novel discovery, as I was terrified of falling asleep at the wheel and felt changing lanes was a recipe for disaster.
Eventually I did find an apartment in the Mission (that’s another story entirely) and by then, even though I was now getting home at 11:15 instead of well after midnight, I was able to finally lay down, and fall asleep without any internal competition for my attention. I would sleep a solid 7-9 hours, waking up at a relatively decent hour for classes, and head back to work in the evening. Even when I stopped hosting and started waiting tables and bartending, which occasionally had me working day shifts, I’d found a rhythm my body and mind could finally agree on.
For many years, this worked for me: keep my mind occupied at school during the day and my body busy at work at night, and both would collapse into my mattress come midnight or so. When I lost my job at the restaurant (through no fault of my own, mind you… I was injured on the job and subsequently fired after filing a worker’s comp claim, and I should have sued, and I would have won) I eventually landed my current day job, which brought the unfortunate stipulation that I had to be there at 8am. Every. Day. It was an adjustment, for sure, but I managed. By now, my body was so used to getting the sleep it rightly deserved, I started falling asleep at 9:30pm or 10pm in order to wake up at 7am, roll out of bed, and stumble down to the office.
Two months later, I was hospitalized after a kidney nearly exploded and was told I was diabetic. In the now 5 years since then, various health complications have cropped up to prevent me from getting a decent night’s sleep. In 2009, my right lung became inflamed and for 6 weeks, I couldn’t inhale without feeling like I’d been stabbed in the back with a fork. In 2010, my ileum flared up, dictating an impromptu appendectomy, and still about 2-3 times a month, for a day or two at a time, swells up and makes the last few hours of the digestion process incredibly uncomfortable, if not downright painful. Days before New Year’s this year, I was again hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis after eating some bad Thai food and while in the Emergency Room waiting for a bed in the main hospital, was diagnosed with acute pericarditis that also has been flaring up about once a month since. To make a long story slightly less long, all these complications make staying asleep difficult, if not almost impossible, for a full night.
And so the epic battle continues: now, though, it’s my brain that’s ready to shut off, but my body preventing it from slumber. Generally some pain medication, a beer, and/or a few tokes on the pipe will help put me down, but I’m not sure how long I can really deal with this. Maybe if I had an “active” job again, instead of sitting at a computer all day, my body would get some use during the day and lay off itself come nightfall. Maybe I should work out. Maybe I should get a hot boyfriend and have amazing sex every night to tire me out. But those maybes are harder to realize than they are to imagine, so instead I write, or I knit, or I play Skyrim until my vision blurs and a few hours of blissful unconsciousness settle in before Mason jumps on my face at 6am to remind me that, since he is wide awake and wants to play, I should be too.
Fucking cat.
Thom Sinclair 