Question

This is a request for information dear reader(s). Yes, that includes the three of you that actually post comments and the untold thousands (I am convinced) that do not. This is YOUR chance to "help a brother out" as the saying goes. Since I seem to have lost the ability to feel sleepy, I am requesting guidance and perhaps some inspiration. That is the question that I want (your) answer(s) to. What does it feel like to be sleepy??? Since I skip from feeling awake to feeling absolutely exhausted but still awake I skip the "sleepy" phase, and am now desperately seeking information on how it feels. Use your imagination(s) give me some good stuff. Put some thought into it. Tell me how sweet it must feel to just be drifting off to sleep, eyes closing, thoughts becoming slower and slower. Smaller and smaller concentric circles (like a Celtic knot? unending maybe?) as you slowly relax your hold on consciousness, and visit that happy land called sleep that seems to have revoked my passport. I am quite confident that someone has a lovely explanation of this feeling, and hope they would be willing to share the information. All in the interests of science, or maybe art.

Failure

A wise person once said that a man (i guess this person was a sexiest) is defined by his failures. That the true test of one's character is to be found when they are facing adversity/failure. Well, it would appear that I am in the testing zone. Over the last week I have managed to author three rather clear (though small) failures. These failures were on a rather personal level (not THAT personal, no blue pill is necessary), and were fairly spectacular in their own special way. Nothing that I won't manage to survive, but nonetheless they still leave bruises on the old ego. I suppose I should take solace in the fact that the last man to hit over .400 in baseball, Ted Williams, still made 271 outs as opposed to 185 hits. If Teddy Ballgame can't succeed more that 40% of the time, what chance do the rest of us mere mortals have? However, unlike Mr. Williams I am not precisely sure if I am going to get 456 at bats to correct my average. I am pretty sure I DON'T want to get that many more chances to prove that I am not a total zero. This is not self-pity or whining by any stretch of the imagination it is merely a thought exercise in percentages, or perhaps, hope. A person rarely learns anything by winning, they can make a thousand and one mistake, and as long as they win/succeed they are likely to believe they did the "right" things, and will continue with the "winning" formula. True lessons are learned in defeat, by failure, by looking back and seeing that moment in time when it all went horribly wrong. Trust me that moment exists, it is there you just have to find it. It might be hard to spot, or it may be as plain as the nose on your face, but it is there. That moment, that slice of time, that you, for all your wishing, can't retrieve, can't get back, and can't stop reliving is there. Fewer people remember the keeper that saved the penalty kick than remember the poor, unlucky, bastard that blazed it over the bar. Despair has a way of drawing people together. More of us can understand what Roberto Baggio felt than can remember the name of the Brazilian keeper that stood there and just watched (it was Taffarel for those that care). Failure makes mortals of us all. True as Patton said Americans love a winner, but each of can certainly identify with the loser. After three failures in less that a week, I don't have to identify with the loser, I just have to hope that a lot of people didn't see that/them.

Dormir

Sleep, precious, precious Sleep. It seems that it is something that my body has decided to forgo. Like a really loaded chocolate sundae, my body has decided that while it WANTS to sleep, it really does not need it. Lately I have been lucky to get 2-3 hours of sleep a night. Glorious stuff. Even then the sleep I get is not continuous. I get one hour here, then toss and turn for 2 hours to get the next hour. I am tired. So very tired that I am lucky to be able to string two complete sentences that make sense together. So tired that I almost fell asleep at dinner over my food (in a public restaurant no less). It still would have been glorious. I look like hell. The waitress kept asking me if I was "ok", and I do not think she meant (from the tone of her voice) that she was worried about me liking my food. I feel like Christian Bale in The Machinist or Robert De Niro in Insomnia. There have been, in the last week or so, those lovely moments when I am just about to fall asleep, and suddenly the phone rings. Damn and blast! Now I am awake again, and have to start over. Unlike our hero Hamlet the rub is getting to sleep. I will take my chances with what dreams may come. In fact, the only way I can tell I have been asleep is if I happen to remember having a dream. Another downside to this lack of sleep is I now have another 3-5 hours a day extra of time to kill. Mon Dieu!!!! Think about that for a second. You can only read so much, everyone else you know is fucking asleep, late night TV is a wasteland that would make T.S. Eliot proud, and here I am awake and staring at the walls. Notice I did not say wide awake. I am not wide awake I am in some exhausted state that cries out for sleep that is not coming. Add that up, and you have 21-35 hours a WEEK!! Talk about needing a hobby. Try filling up that amount of extra time a week. Of course, it has it upsides, a lot of things seem a lot funnier after about 4 nights of 3 hours of sleep. The downsides are there too, it is very difficult to concentrate, and spell even the simplest words. Plus, I suspect that my ability to make sense might be affected. Problem is, how the fuck can I tell? I think I make perfect sense, but then again I am punchy with fatigue.