Emerald Bile

Insomniacs are tiresome people - whining and whinging about their inability to perform a fairly simple human function - marvelling that they are so special and different to ordinary "sleeping" people and implying that, in some way they occupy a more important place in the world than people with regular sleep patterns, that their importance is what keeps them awake - the fear that if they were to shut an eye - the world would collapse around them into the hands of inferior beings. I find anxiety disorders equally tedious - the fretting control freak, a taut, nervy machine on constant alert - just fuck off and get over yourself.

Given the choice, many people would swap sleep (in return for absence of tiredness) to give themselves more hours to carry out the meaningless shit they do, or to add contrived purpose to their actions, be it a God, a sense of value in their work or an inflated view of their personal influence on the lives of others. Thankfully the option of extended yawn-free vigilance still remains at the mercy of chemicals - no one has yet invented anything safe to keep idiots alert for longer than the power of a few lines of coke or some pro plus.

Control junkies aren't special in their ability to be annoying - indeed most things about human beings are irritating - from the artist constantly trying to better nature when at best he can rival or imitate, to the person who yearns for more hours in the day - a slightly different soul to the insomniac, Philip Challinor, before you start, insomniacs are addicted to tiredness and wear it as a yashmak of superiority, the "more hours in the day" cunt is the man who has just lost sight of his own value, he may sleep well at night. Although being awake may mean that a person has more control over his actions, he makes choices when to move and how, what actions to perform, it does not necessarily make those waking actions any more pleasurable or impressive than those that take place in his sleeping life. Just as a constant background noise masks the respiration of the world and the paintings in the art gallery block the view of the sunset, so does waking life seem to overpower the sleeping brain. The opiate of control is such that we become stupid to the constant presence of control-free pleasure, going as far as to play bluff and double bluff with ourselves, controlling our lack of control with drugs and substances from those as mundane as alcohol, to exotically post- gap- year ayahuasca in order to relax our grip, and experience that which was there all along.

As we have little recollection of what happens in our sleep unless it is a night terror or a particularly vivid dream, sonambulism or other such showy behaviour, it does not mean that sleeping is any less enjoyable than being awake. If in the waking hours our memories were reduced to be extremely short term, it would merely mean that pleasures would be quickly forgotten, rather than absent. Too much is made of pleasure simply being the answer to an ache, the act of living is a pleasure in itself.
That is all
Noreen