July 19, 2026

The worst night of insomnia in a while. I tried to play my way back to bed. I wrote this to my writer's group: The man woke up at 3am, dull heat coursing through his veins but refusing to escape through his porous skin holes. He sat up in bed, spine straightening in time to his heartbeat. This is a new kind of pulse, bigger than he felt three years ago, when he was last adrift like this. That cloudy frame of mind that arises when the beats wake you up in your ears is round and rubbery, with a weird surface tension, like lake water under moonlight. Frogs previously soaking the air go quiet. Strange brain troubles crest the surface as he decided what to do next. His retired doctor and network of net-informed non-professionals have counseled him to fill his quiver with a rainbow of attack lines. Big hammers of anesthetic that paradoxically have the opposite effect, and induce more thinking and energy. He's too tired to make sense of them though, and each one occupies a channel on the TV in his mind, and someone has written a program which switches the channels in random order, dang dang dang dang dang, until the only thing he can do is observe the rhythm. Benadryl and Bananas, like a lost Ween song, can be heard behind the din of the TV, drum track in time with the channel switching. Now he tiptoes past his sleeping wife and attentive dog, down the hall, past the picture of Miles glaring back at the camera. "wherethefuckyougoinmuthafucka, wherethefuckyougoinmuthafucka, wherethefuckyougoinmuthafucka". Silently out into the moonlight, he steps lightly off the stoop into backlit green, and that sternum light starts to pull out of him a little. He feels a little lighter after a few deep breaths, but still clogged. There's an owl nearby. It's sound is some sort of announcement, maybe an invitation, so he climbs a nearby tree to see what he can see. Wide wings flap above him, and he feels the wind. The TV shuts down, pores open up, water rushes in, demons leave, Bulgarian ladies sing a high major second, the frogs kick back in, and he's ready for bed. Link to the post.