Sleeplessness

Night lasts all day for me. The wheels in my mind never stop spinning. I have tried everything just to slow them down. Beer, tv, reefer, movies, sleeping pills, Ny Quil, nothing works. Its always the same. I lay down to doze and within minutes, I snap back to life. The gears whirr and buzz back to life like a steam engine grinding away behind my red, itchy eye sockets. Dreams are a luxury that my mind doesn’t have. When I do dream, they aren’t so much dreams as they are nightmares. Nightmares that would make any man quake and cower. Some nights I relive the horrors of my darkest days. Some nights I see buildings crumble and fires rage from unexplained disaster. The only thing that always remains constant is that I am alone. Occasionally I witness those I once cared for being taken from me but usually they are lost because of my actions, just as it is in so called waking life. I lie for hours staring into the ceiling, it feels like it is getting lower and closer to my face. Bowing inward, downward, it is inches from my nose. I can feel my brain oozing out of my ears and pooling onto the sweat soaked pillow under my head.

When I am at work all I want is to leave and when I leave all I want to do is go back. I float through my day. My head bobs in and out of clouds. “Are you ok?” “You look tired” I work with one hundred people who ask the same questions one hundred times. When I say that I can’t sleep, they laugh, they think its a party. Could anyone really know what happens to me when I am not there and I’m not in character? Do they know that the party is to keep a breakdown at bay? I halfheartedly explain it if I give a shit but in the end, they couldn’t understand. When you try to tell people your problems they offer the most moronic advice. They will suggest things that you tried over and over as if you never thought of them anyways and I don’t wan to hear it. I secretly want to make them hate me as much as I hate myself. Can I tell them that I am not their performing monkey? Can I tell them that every night I lie on the couch, floor bed and bathtub hoping that tonight is the night that I finally sleep? They want me to perform regardless. Thats what I do. I make them all laugh and giggle and snicker. They whisper that they can’t believe what I just said. Never sated, they want more. If I’m not performing at that moment, something must be wrong with me and I’m an asshole. So I should just perform. I can put on the clown paint, its easier anyways because thats just what I do.

Tonight has been a particularly long night. I ate a half bar of Xanax when I got off of work at 8 and the other at about 3 AM. I have been staring out the window at the boarded up houses behind my building since. I often go out and explore them but March in Cleveland is a bitch and I’m not anxious enough to freeze my dick off tonight. The Xanax and scotch I’ve been drinking are making me shake enough. I crack the window enough to stick my hand out. The ice cold drizzle forms bubbles on my skin that burst and run down my arm. I could fit my whole body out if I wanted to but I hang my head until the water forms a sieve in my hair and a waterfall in front of my face. I watch as the stream dumps all of the way down to the parking lot below. I look back over my shoulder and remember that I was watching Bucktown with Fred Williamson and Pam Grier. Johnny Pate’s score from the film is a favorite of mine. Damn, Pam was sexy. Reminds me that I am lonely as hell. I have always been successful with women, despite my looks. Relationships have always been easy for me to attain but not so easy to keep. I ruin most things I touch and women are no different. Who cares? I try to convince myself out loud in slurred speech. Fuck it. I don’t give a shit. I lie to no one but myself. My knees begin to weaken and I feel like I am going to pass out. Things begin to go black, I try to resist at first but not for long. Passing out could be the only way at this point. I drop to the cold concrete floor and my mind goes blank. Sweet sleep is finally upon me. Flashes of the pain I have experienced over the last few months blow through my mind. I felt the full throttle of pain shoot right through my heart. It opened my eyes for a moment. I lie on my side wondering where I was for a moment. I felt the wheels start to spin again, slowly at first and within seconds they were back to full blast. The sun was coming up and Johnny Pate’s soundtrack was still playing in the background. I had to be at work in two hours. Again, night has lasted all day.

Bookbinding

My first day at the bookbinding factory and I had to be there by 7:00. I was up and ready by 6:30. I wanted to be prepared so I split an eighth of mushrooms with my friend who got me the job. Good idea, right? He tore the covers off of books at the beginning of the line. My job was to take the coverless books and cut the pages to the same length. I was beginning to peak during training. The guy who was training me's voice began to echo in my ear and refracted softly off of my brain. The ceiling in the factory was high, so very high and had a skeleton of beams and infrastructure that zig-zagged under aluminum air ducts. The welding that was going on in the other side of the factory gave off a bluish hue that sparkled and played in reflections off of the......What? The man training me could see that I wasn't paying attention.
"Pay attention, because this is the dangerous part." He said.
My duties were to take books with the cover torn off from a cart, place them on a machine, press a button, which would clamp the book into place, pull a lever and BANG! A huge gullotine-like blade slammed down into the book and cut the pages accordingly.
"So you push this button with your left hand," He pushed the button and down came the clamp, pressing the book into position.
"Then you grab this lever with your right hand" In his right hand, he grasped and pulled on a horizontal bar with a rubber grip on it. I was very much feeling those mushrooms by now and looked over and saw that my friend was too-his pupils were the size of quarters and looked as if he was taking particular enjoyment in ripping the covers off of books.
"Now when you grab this bar, you see, the safety comes down"
The safety looked like a row of elongated test tubes, that fell down on top of the book, directly in front of where the blade comes out.
"If they don't fall flat, the blade wont come out" He began to pull the lever back some.
BANG! The blade came down and cut the book nicely. The safety had a sickly yellow color and glistened with lubricant from the blade. I imagined that it was the first row of teeth on a mechanical monster that consumed paper and small children's arms. It was a deep sea fish with a light that dangles in front of it's face, luring fish close to the light. Once close enough, the predatory fish's needle-pointed incisors extend and ensnare the foolish fish. The animal before me waited until you gripped it's handle, with it's soft, soothing rubber grip and then trapped you with it's jaundiced "safety" and sliced you into pieces with it's trap door meat cleaver tooth, hidden deep inside it's expressionless face.
Yeah, the mushrooms were in full effect.
"So if you, look over here, if you had your hand under here, the safety would not land flat and.." Was he really putting his hand there?
BANG! The blade came out without the safety's permission. His three middle fingers were the monster's latest victims, chopping them off just above the length of his pinky. He let out a shrill cry that reverberated throughout the factory, bouncing back into my brain. I looked down at the machine where there was a ramp that led to a cart. The cart was filled with the paper trimmings from the books that were cut, a little Mexican guy came by four times a day to empty it. The finger-parts rolled down the chute and into the cart, leaving a bloody trickle behind them. He continued to shout, and turned white as a sheet. People ran over and wrapped his spurting hand in a roll of industrial grade brown paper towels from the men's room. Another man gathered the fingertips from the cart. Off to the hospital he went. I finished my day sweeping the floor, the mushrooms wore off on the ride home.

Joyride