Dreaming About Sleep

Last night I did everything right. I stopped drinking caffeine before 5pm. I avoided any strenuous activity that would get my heart rate pumping. I ate a dinner that was large but not so much as to cause heartburn. I watched television on the TV. I did a little bit of work, drank a little bit of warm milk, disappeared into my room at 11 pm, read a few pages from "Against the Day," and went to sleep.

No. I went to bed. And laid there for five minutes. And I knew that I was not going to get very much sleep that night. I had to wake up at 7 to telecommute for my goofy start-up job. The day clicked forward at midnight. I turned onto my stomach. My stomach hurt. I turned onto my back. My everything hurt. I did the stretches my physical therapist told me to do. They didn't help. I watched an episode of Lost for the fifth time, waiting for sleep to claim me. I got just close enough to subconsciousness that I thought I was on the island. Then I pulled back. My mind wouldn't let me sleep.

Insomnia is a bummer. My shrink's big new idea is that more sleep is the key to my mental health. Going to a shrink is great, because I always leave in the state of epiphany, like I have finally figured out my mental state - it's all because of x! And y! And yes, z, too!

It's like with my back problems. My first physical therapist said I had to detense my back muscles. After some exploration, she decided the real problem was that I was tensing my stomach muscles. Then it turned out that my hamstrings were getting in on the action, too. Stretch, she said, stretch. Yoga. Eastern philosophy will save your body from itself. Then it turned out that my posture was all wrong. And I talked too fast, walked too fast, wrote too fast with too few punctuation points.

Recently, I've discovered that my right foot angles out when I walk. It's a rotator cuff problem. My new physical therapist says I can't do any leg exercises - nothing that will tense up the hamstring to kneecap area. No running. And no sit-ups - that will impact the chest muscles. How about that - just when I devote myself fully to developing my body into a Terminator 2 KillFace machine, I'm not allowed to develop my six-pack. Unbelievable, the timing.

Fortuitously, I've still got my good looks.