Well, this is one of those all too frequent nights of not being able to sleep. In spite of all of my medications I can't seem to rest and relax enough to fall asleep and please don't blame it on the nap I took this afternoon. That was a mere half hour nap. So what do I do? I took a nice long shower to relax, trying to read a book of mindful cognitive therapy and petting Mister Gonif. If I am up, all my boys are up. Almost 2:00 a.m. My mind is going a mile a minute. I was hoping learning about mindfulness would help. I am going to get t-shirts printed with the phrase "Go gentle and breathe", which I shall attribute to Hyphen. Royalties will be split, I already have orders for ten. Just think of it, in eight hours I will be leaving for downtown East Lansing for breakfast with more friends. Newspaper should be here in four hours. At this rate I will have enough time to read it before I leave at 10:00. Yankel came out to sleep on the couch, Gonif is on the floor by me and it is too early for Simcha to be sleeping on my head. There is crap on TV and the mindful book is not holding my attention . Maybe get to the book on setting boundaries.
So my mind is running in overdrive. Maybe I will bring one of the guitars out to the living room and play gently and breathe. Or get out a book of T.S. Elliott poems and re-read Prufrock...dare I eat a peach? Well, hell, I only have nectarines. I remember Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner doing the 2,000 year old man routine and Brooks saying the secret to his longevity was nectarines. But I believe they pre-date Elliott. I wish I knew if there was someone up, like me, I could talk to. I recall once I called the local suicide prevention center and was put on hold. No, really, it happened to me. I ended up going to the student health center for some harmless Benadryl to help me sleep, which it didn't. When I first moved from Detroit to East Lansing I couldn't sleep because almost forty years ago East Lansing was less 'urban' then it is now. There was no traffic noise at night. It was dead quiet...too quiet. I literally had insomnia for six weeks and ended up getting put on hold by the suicide prevention people, which made me laugh at the absurdity and righted my thought processes. I needed sleep and a joke to get through. And that with a prescription for Elavil and starting therapy got me through the next few months. The. I turned to drinking copious amount of wine, beer and whiskey and drank myself out of the doctoral program. Which was followed by almost four years of being totally aimless. For a while I played in bars, a perfect place for a drunk, as Molly Malone. I sang good old folk songs, some I had written. I wish I could remember more of what I had written. But there is a district alcohol haze clouding my recollection. After that ill fated adventure I pumped gas for three years, getting robbed a number of times and In general down on my luck. Thank God for the Edwards' who knew of a job opening in the library on campus and the rest is her story. By 1990 I became the Czarina. And seven years later I became sober and saner and became a better Czarina.
So that is my story and I am sticking to it.
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