Swinish Insonia
October 21st, 2009
The disorganised and the self important tell you that there are not enough hours in the day. They are wrong. There are too many hours in the day, dangerously so. If you don’t sleep away at the very least six and for the best, eight of them , then you will go quite mad.
I have just come out of a session with the ‘flu. With the aches, the shakes, and the surges of sick adrenaline through the nervous piping, it is impossible to settle the mind into sleep. So insomnia kept me company for three nights. I lay in every position with my eyelids shut tight as screwed up handkerchiefs but sleep wouldn’t come. I gave up and lay on my back with eyes wide open to the darkness thinking bad thoughts of childhood, dwelling on more recent but hardly adult disasters and dissecting bills I wouldn’t be well enough to pay on time.
Twenty four hours awake is more awareness than man can bear, especially if the man concerned has a perception of existence as wide and deep as a cat litter. Michael Jackson discovered that. Mind you, his take on humanity was so peculiarly skewered, I don’t think I could have coped with ten minutes consciousness of it. He craved operating theatre anaesthetics to escape. I was less desperate. I knew this, at worse, was some ersatz version of swine flu. I was a little piglet and all I had to do was be patient.
After 5 days of sweaty, sleazy viewing, the heart knew what the head has always told, that television is a lie, one great big unstoppable satellite, cable and terrestrial lie. There is no ethic, proportion or decency to it. If Micheal Jackson craved the ultimate knock out serum, it’s because he had been watching too many Discovery channels.
After 5 days, the swine fled and I tottered weak but shriven down to the car to drive to mass. After five ravenous repeats of ‘Top Gear’ running simultaneously over three channels, what else was there to do? I turned the ignition. The battery was dead. I knew how it felt. In the darkness of a subterranean garage, an ageing Englishman and an old German car sat in silent communion.
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