"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
~ Red Smith
I've stopped sleeping again.
The world has become liquid Technicolor and everything sounds out of focus. My eyes are watered and transparent. It would be entertaining if my stomach wasn't causing me so much anxiety.
Oooh -- I correct myself. I spent two and a half hours last night in a Kava induced stupor. Long enough to have two positively frightening and grotesque nightmares that wiped out the possibility of further sleep.
My room consists of four giant, uninsulated windows a dozen feet from the mainest road in Somerville. I can tell the time by the sounds of traffic. Trucks cut through from Rt. 16 to the Interstate between midnight and 2:00 am. The newspaper guy starts at 3:00 in his beat-up burgundy van. He drives a few yards, flings the car door open, freeing acid rock into the still air, thumping three papers onto doorsteps, and slamming the door closed again to drive a few yards. Lather, rinse, repeat. The 89 bus makes its first run from Sullivan station at 5:10. The trash at 6:15, the recycling at 7:00.
I know this because of my insomnia, which I used to cure by sitting on my front porch in my bathrobe chainsmoking.
Last night I had a nightmare that I was babysitting. Wait -- that wasn't the scary part. I was hanging out with two little kids, and suddenly I remembered that I left my rabbit out in the yard where bees were terrorizing the neighborhood. I quickly ran down, and found him in a tiny cage in the sun, where he was cooking, covered ear to tail in bees. The bees had eaten off the top of his head and the back of his hind legs so I could see up into his hollowed-out ears. There was a gaping hole and bees stinging him on his brain. I tearfully blasted him with water from the hose in attempt to ward off the insects and cool down his flesh that had been baking in the sun.
My parents were lying in lawn chairs a few feet away, and I was screaming at them hysterically, asking why they hadn't done anything about the rabbit when they saw the bees. Neither of them could hear me. (The story of my life.)
My poor rabbit was in total shock, and I wrapped him in my shirt and was going to take him to the hospital. My father started yelling at me about wasting money taking the bunny to the vet, and how he wasn't paying for it. I didn't want his money, but he wouldn't let me get in the car. More than anything, I was ready to vomit with guilt over keeping a defenseless animal and then not defending him.
I woke up in a panic, sick to my stomach, and ran into the living room. I woke up my poor rabbit and squeezed him just to make sure he wasn't hollow and filled with bees. I also surveyed his cage to confirm that he lived like a king -- probably better than any other rabbit ever. A certified spoiled brat. In a bug-free, climate-controlled house.
Guaranteed this nightmare was caused by two things: the juvenile bunny pictures I posted yesterday; and a conversation I had about bees and epi-pens being analogous to the Dramamine dispenser in my bag.
So who could sleep after that, right?
I managed another hour between the paper guy and the 89 bus and then got up, defeated. I played the piano. I stared into space. I wrote a chapter of that stupid freaking novel.
Wait! That's it! It's the stupid freaking novel!
I hate this book. It is the bain of my existence. It soils the very pith and marrow of my attribute. I gotta kill somebody off soon or I will not survive.
I locked myself in my apartment on Saturday and sat in that chair from 7:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. arguing with my computer. As I was artistically constipated, two liters of diet coke and a grande latte enema allowed me to pass nearly 8,000 words, which was by no means adequate for the pain they invoked. I took every phone call desperately and tried to keep each person on the line long enough to save me, but my friends all know what I'm up to and so they refused to be a part of my procrastination attempts.
There is one benefit to writing your own novel, however. You create the characters. Most characters end up being a conglomerate of people from your life, inspired by people in your life, or actual people from your life. And you can do anything to them you want. Fiction is a giant voodoo doll. Come here, you little cheating bastard. In chapter seven, you get to be the homeless guy on the sidewalk with gout. I'll even name him after your mother. And you, you gorgeous golden creature from the coffee shop -- you get to make out with the supermodel in chapter four. In fiction, your favorite musicians become rock stars, your friends become millionaires, and your fictional equivalent gets to sleep with every secret crush you've ever had.
Okay, that would be too much fiction. Except for the sleeping with everyone part, which in general happens for me.
I'm sure.
Anyway, my evil Photojournalism advisor, who called me "the photographer with the writing problem," was forced to work at McDonald's in chapter eight. And he had brain damage from that tragic fryer incident.
I'm spending so much time living in this little world between the pages that I re-emerge into my real life in a haze. I'm not sure what day it is. I'm not sure if I really spoke to that person, or if I made that up. Or if my rabbit is in the hospital. Or if my friend did truly score a record deal with Sub Pop.
I'm so tired.
My other nightmare from last night involved the ritual parakeet dream that I go through impatiently. When I feel the dream coming on, I'm like, "Okay, okay. Hurry up. Get it over with." This time, I dreamed that there were lovebirds in the parakeet cage. Three of them. They were beautiful -- like the blue-masked lovebirds I had when I was younger that I handfed from hatchlings. But there wasn't enough room in the cage. They were crushing out the two proper residents. I've come to believe that somehow the bird cage serves as a microcosm of my life.
So a few months ago, right before my parents moved to Florida, I was sitting with my mother and my sister talking about dreams. I didn't say a word about the parakeet dreams I have, which as I've mentioned in previous entries occur nightly and involve the accidental slaughter of my innocent birds. My sister, who like me is a little bit into the whole mystical spiritual world of dream analysis and Tarot, says she has a reoccurring dream about a parakeet in a cage. My mom jumps up and says, "Me too!" so I ask them what happens to the birds.
My sister says the bird is always singing and serves as a source of inspiration in her life. My mother says her bird is dying, and she pulls out the seed cup to see it filled with hulls. At the last minute, she fills the cup with seed and saves the bird.
So I tell them how every night Soleil and Mordecai are either strangled, drowned, baked, squashed or decapitated by my own hands.
The conversation stops abruptly and I shrug. I'm not surprised that my mother, sister and I have dreams of similar content. Or that mine is as disturbing as my sister's is inspiring. The imagery itself -- the parakeet -- could easily come my family keeping parakeets beginning when my mom was a little girl. But I thought it was strange that we all use the parakeet dream in particular as a mental health gauge.
Eisuke and I would have the same dreams. He and I were cut from the same glass; the freckles in our eyes were mirror images. He dreamed about trains with me, and I dreamed about warm oceans, bridges and techno for him. We were linked inexplicably, and it never surprised me that we could read each other's minds or have the same dreams. We planned some of them. "When you get inside the dream, wait by the parakeet. I'll be right there."
Eisuke will get to be a wizard in my next novel.
Oh, the whole novel thing. If I just finish it, I'll be able to sleep. But the less sleep I have, the weirder the book's getting. We might end up with a wizard in the current story. Working at the coffee shop. And then becoming a rock star.
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