You Can Sleep When You’re Dead
My most consistent challenge in the last few weeks–aside from, but related to, not losing my mind–has been getting to sleep and staying that way for enough hours to do the job. Insomnia has been a lifelong struggle, but I’ve developed some skills over the years to minimize it: meditation, catching thoughts, reading before bed, masturbating, getting enough exercise, doing affirmative prayer. Frankly, the best skill of all is taking Ambien, but I can’t always get my hands on it–like now, when Kaiser makes you pay for it out of pocket at about $70 a pop, so I have to settle for Xanax, but it’s not the same. (Anyone want to put some Ambien in the mail for Mama?)
Insomnia comes for me in bouts, and they usually have to do with worrying over something. I get in bed and, no matter how tired I am, my brain will start puttering, then running, then spinning and looping and having a rip-roaring time. Stopping it is like trying to halt a locomotive at full speed. A locomotive that is not only obsessing about something but with song lyrics relentlessly cycling in its head, and fears, and checkbook calculations and half-dreams, all competing for attention from an extremely exhausted engine. (Ok, I know; weird metaphor.) The worst combination of factors for my insomnia is:
worrying
+ having to get up early
+ hot summer nights with no air conditioning.
I can think of two summers in particular when circumstances were such that I don’t think I slept a full eight hours the whole summer. Good times. (c.f., the wrinkles under my eyes.)
So I found my cat Paco back in 1999, and he’s been with me through thick and thin–road trips across the country, five houses, as many girlfriends. He looks a little like a black, fat Oscar the grouch, but he’s my longest committed relationship. This picture doesn’t do justice to his beautiful green eyes:
Paco’s a wonderful companion, but he has one MAJOR drawback: He’s a morning person. And when I say morning, I’m talking early fucking morning. Morning that isn’t even morning yet. That’s when he begins these neurotic, inside, outside, eat, jump on the bed, back outside rounds that steal years of my life in lost sleep. And this is a cat who refuses to use the cat door I put in the basement, unlike my perfect-child cat, Rico.
All this is context for appreciatiing the morning I had a couple of days ago.
It was Thursday morning. I was recovering from a cold, so I was snotty and coughy and not myself. I had a huge day ahead of me in teaching and meetings, and since I was also worrying over some things the night before, it had taken me a long time to fall asleep.
3:45. I hear the first meow. The first meow typically means, “Mommy, look at my bowl in the kitchen. Is there food in it? Will you double-check?”
You may wonder why I do this. The only answer I have is that I’ve learned over the years that I can deal with it better than the incessant meowing.
3:59. “MrrrrEEEP.” This means, “Ok, I ate. Now, will you let me outside?” So I get up again and open the front door. Paco exits. Back to sleep, no problem.
4:45. Scratching in my skull. No, that’s scratching at the front door. I get up and let him back in. It’s easier than dealing with the scratching, which I can hear through two pillows squeezed over my head. I always have this fantasy that he’ll go back to sleep when I let him back in, which sometimes–rarely–he does, although all this is early, even for him.
5:01. “MrrrrOW. MrrrOWW?!” Now the bastard decides he’s on the wrong side of the door after all. I toss the covers off and heave his hairy ass out. Okay, now I can sleep for an hour and a half before the alarm goes off. I burrow into the covers.
5:23. “Beep.”
I peel my eyelids back open. This is not a cat sound, but an electric sound. A familiar sound that my cells seem to remember has unraveled me in previous years, previous houses. I peer up at my ceiling just in time to see a tiny red light flash. The fire alarm. No, can’t be. Maybe I imagined it. I lie there for eighteen long minutes.
“Beep.”
“FUCK!!!” It sucks to get out of bed angry, though I’m sure all parents do on a routine basis. I’m walking around the cold floors in my bare feet in a blind rage, trying to figure out if I have one of those goddamned square batteries somewhere. I fumble through a tupperware box filled with miscellanea, and–miracle of all bloody miracles–find said battery. Of course, the alarm itself is directly over the head of my bed; to reach it I would have to put a step stool directly on the mattress and hope I don’t kill myself. Ain’t going to happen.
5:54. I’m in a t-shirt, no underwear, balancing on five regular pillows and a doubled-over body pillow stacked high enough for me to barely reach the bastard beeping fire alarm, cursing a steady stream of filth. I yank on the plastic round thing from hell, manage to get it open, toss the old battery on the floor and by some act of divine grace get the new battery in and stop the insanity.
6:01. Back in bed.
6:03. Scratching at the front door. “MrrrOW?!”
6:04. Forget it, I might as well get up.
Mooj advice: Give your neurotic cat some of the Xanax (seriously, I’m making an appointment w/ the Vet), know how to replace your fire alarm battery, and always have extra batteries in the house. Alternately, as my friend Grandpa says, “You can sleep when you’re dead.”
