The Big Sleep

Insomnia is no fun.

I’ve had it pretty bad now for about a year. It’s lame and consistent and my sleeping pill stash has been dwindling. It's especially lame because I can’t figure out what causes it, and the price of sleeping pills just keeps climbing.

Inflation in this country is an epic battle.

Of course logic stipulates that it’s stress or anxiety or the bottle of bourbon in my panty drawer that must be keeping me up at odd hours, but things that stress me out keep changing, and my life keeps changing, and even, yes, my boyfriends keep changing, or they did when I had them, but insomnia . . . so consistent.

Recently it’s the stuff that comes before sleep that keeps me from getting there, the pseudo dream stuff your mind starts to explore just before you drift off into black beta waves. My before-sleep stuff is starting to become something of nightmares, only there’s really nothing bad going on in them. Just people I know, people I’ve tried to forget, we all hang out at a bar and laugh about old times. Only no one is drinking, and I’m smoking, and I don’t smoke. Also, the old times are usually old for a reason. They’re things I’d rather forget.

I’m taking a break from writing, something I would not have a problem with a year ago, or a couple years ago. I’m taking a break on purpose now, a week or two, I tell myself, the MS is getting stale and I need new perspective. Meanwhile, I have no new ideas for the massive holes in the plot but I’m writhing in agony over not typing, and my pre-dream stuff is getting pretty far out there.

In one of these, I’m in Spain again, and I’m watching a movie I know and I’m eating popcorn, the good kind that’s so buttered it’s orange, served up old school in those striped red and white boxes. The theater is pitch black and I’m confused because the usher, responding to my broken Spanish, examined my ticket and led me into a dark theater. He dropped me off in the back of a near deserted playhouse with a film already underway. There are only a couple people littering the seats in odd intervals, the kind of haphazard pattern that signals a matinee or a restless day, just some broken hearts and listless old women whiling away the time.

On the screen, there is a beautiful foreign creature screaming in Spanish, but it’s all hopelessly screwed up. She is blonde and blue eyed, but she is no California dream. She looks European with that lazy, undone prettiness, and she is screaming at an older woman in what looks like a Cuban cabana. I find out it is an island off Nicaragua, the older woman is her mother, and they are screaming over her black lover. She switches effortlessly from Spanish back to French when it suits her, but the subtitles are in English, except when they are not.

There is a lot I am missing but I do not mind, I am comfortable with my popcorn and the woman next to me has large glasses and is giggling, never mind that the black lover all the fuss seems to be about just washed up ashore near the cabana as an unhappy corpse.

I bought tickets to see The Lake House. It’s printed on my stub, and while I’m no expert at foreign nuances I am pretty sure Sandra Bullock is not going to pop out of the closet.

The movie ends over an hour later and I am not sure what I paid for. The woman next to me turns and starts talking to me, gesturing, but I don’t hear any of her words. It’s like someone hit the mute button on a magic remote control and I am just watching another movie. I sit and eat my popcorn and watch her mouth things at me until she starts to cry behind her big glasses. Big watery fishbowls, filling. I have no idea what is going on.

There are several problems with the whole thing. Namely, I remember this day in Spain very well, because I remember all the days well. It was a hundred and six degrees everyday, and there was nothing else to do all month long but burn and try to stay awake. But several things are off, and I never did get the title of that bizarre film, though I waited through an agonizing hour of obscure film to get it. Also, this is just pre-dream stuff, but I remember the theater and going there, but I know I didn’t have any popcorn. I had spent my last euro on an overpriced taxicab ride.

So I wake up, because it’s better than lying in bed in non-sleep wondering if I have a deep-seated craving for popcorn or I am really just screwed up. There is no breeze outside the window and it’s a sad thing to be in the I.E. when the days are burning again, and there’s no hope for a breeze now and again.

The Write Stuff

It’s been a long week, and I hate when that happens on a Tuesday. The problem is that my boss wants me to more of a cynic.

Those who know me may be thinking, “But if you were to get any more cynical and morose, we worry your hands would shrivel up and fall off.”

Yes, there is that. But apparently my taste for the macabre and sarcastic is too often found in life, and not often enough on the page. Apparently, my nonfiction comes off sounding too chipper. Too “PR”. I’m just too fucking nice.

Who would have thought?

I find it distasteful to tell my editors that being ‘nice’ is faster than being cynical, or that I’m trying to finish my assignment in twenty minutes so I can go back to writing something I actually care about. And anyways, there is only so much one can say about lawn turf and breast enhancement surgery.

But how do you say, “when I was a kid and wanted to be a writer, I didn’t understand that I would have to spend a great portion of my time writing about things I don’t care about, in order to afford to spend a small portion of the time writing about- oh, my opus. My life’s work.”

My editor doesn’t give a shit about any of that. “Be skeptical!” she says instead.

I am, apparently, making the president of a “Power of Positive Thinking” company come off as sounding overly positive. Nevermind the fact that she really is pretty happy most of the time. She prefaces her various emails to me as “Happy Monday!” “Happy Friday!” and she’s already sent me a free copy of her book in the mail.

How skeptical can I be? The chick eats her Wheaties for breakfast. I get it.

But readers don’t care about genuine happy endings. They want to know that the CEO of Sunshine and Rainbow Land actually enjoys snorting cocaine off the overly bronzed stomachs of strippers in between clients. Even if she doesn’t. So fine. I insert skepticism and my editor loves me. All the readers of the entirely unpopular audience-bereft publication I write for will be thrilled. My check for $0.99 is practically in the mail.

I tell myself that’s why, when the LA Times writer I just interviewed gets upset that she will come off sounding like a green-behind-the-ears cub scout in the upcoming issue of our magazine, I can look her straight and the eye and say, “I’m sorry, you said you enjoy NPR and Crossfire was your favorite political debate forum? I could have sworn you said you said it was the Care Bears, and the pink one was your favorite. My mistake. My mistake.”

I wonder if she'll still introduce me to Joel Stein.

And Therin Lies The Rub . .

I am having a problem. You always hear that the first step to fixing it, whatever it is, it admitting you have one. So I have one.

What it is, really, is that I’m writing shit. Shit. It’s a little bit of a concern for me, since it’s Everything I Want to Do. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Evidence:

“It would have been inspiring, if it didn’t want to make Joleen giggle, just a little bit. And she never, ever, giggled. She settled for biting her lip."

There are many problems with that selection, but most important among them is that I was entirely unaware, until last night, that I had been writing a shitty romance novel. The first issue of the night was grappling with how my MS became one, 200 pages in. Delete.

Secondly, Joleen and I, we have an understanding. She's tough, and she doesn't giggle. But does saying "she never, ever giggled," ruin that? I think so. And further, why can't I just let Joleen giggle? The bitch wants to giggle. She's been dealing with some shit. And she doesn’t even know what’s coming. Why do I deny her this moment of springing abandon? Do I know anyone who has never giggled? I think not.

Maybe, I think, the problem is that I am out of touch. Joleen is single, but she does not need to be as crazy as me. She has a penchant for shotguns and stick shifts. Surely, she will do better. She can pull through.

And that is why, I think, I ended up with waffles and screwdrivers at 1 a.m.

The trouble with waffles and screwdrivers is (and you really have to search to find one, because as a rule they are pretty fantastic any time of day) is that the when you get to the point where waffles and screwdrivers are on the horizon, it’s really only baby-steps from there onto much more damaging pursuits, like bad reality television.

Where before you had standards that would balk at “What Not To Wear Now” and “I Love New York,” late night snacking expands your appetite for voracious brain cell slaughter that knows no bounds.

The only upside to waffle-eating and channel flipping is that it (just barely) refocuses me on the task at hand. Ah, research. Joleen will conquer her giggling issue, I think. I will find other women who do not giggle. I will find a woman who has strength of character and a great rack.

Instead, I ended up being sucked in by “The Bachelor.”

I haven’t seen this show in years (probably because during the interim I had a life . . . I’m not sure where that went), but it appears that, if possible, it’s really taken a hit to the middle section.

This season of The Bachelor really amps the drama with the subplot tease, “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

I could interject here with the dangerous territory of anyone, multimillion dollar television industry or not, fucking with the ideal of Richard Gere in his pressed whites. Women need Richard Gere, and reality television shouldn’t be able to take that away.

While the gentle strains of “You Lift Me up Where I Belong,” play wilitingly in the background, we are introduced to Officer Andy Baldwin, Navy Doctor, national hero, humanitarian, and athlete.

What can ABC say, really? Andy likes puppies. He blows dandelions in the breeze. He’ll always let you have the last Dorito chip, and he has a huge dick.

“I just have so much to give,” he actually says, jogging along the beach shirtless and throwing a sexy smile back at us through the camera. “I’m rapidly approaching 30 and I want to find the love of my life.”

And he just happens to be single, through no fault of his own. Surely, ABC, you jest.

Let me tell you what’s really going on, and I don’t need nine more episodes, a tearful engagement, and the following week’s Tattler Magazine to figure it out.

Andy wants to pee on you.

It’s not his fault, because his father left when he was little, he has Mommy issues, and shit happens. But it’s the sad truth, and throwing twenty-five desperate, catty, overly-tanned women into a locked up house to fight it out isn’t going to change that.

I know what you’re thinking. “She’s bitter. She’s bitter, and she shouldn’t have had the second waffle.”

Okay, you’re probably right. I have a syrup addiction I can’t shake, Andy is a great guy, and urine washes off in the shower, so really what is the big deal.

The problem is that the show, like so many others…no, wait, there are no more shows like this because women have stopped watching them, present single women over a certain age with The Dream, that there are fantastic people out there that you, in all your neuroses, simply have not found.

This, my friends, is really why Joleen needs her shotgun in the first place.

If you can’t deal with a little pee here and there, well, who’s fault is it, really? But guys like Officer Andy, guys who get full-ride scholarships to Duke University, join the Navy and become doctors, are six-time Iron Man “finishers,” as he likes to call it, are all around you, and if you will put on a bad dress and sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” they too, will be moved to share their 401(k) with you.

Just as soon as you wash that stuff off your leg.