Do I Make You Sleepy?

I've battled insomnia for years, and have come to accept it as something that Sucks About Me. I won't take sleeping pills because I have an addictive personality (cigarettes; cheddar and sour cream chips; chocolate croissants; wine; chick lit) and I'm running out of room under my shame bush. Not to mention that in my younger years, I saw my insomnia as a virtue of sorts. I didn't need sleep! How cool was that? In high school, I could stay up until 5 a.m. reading in bed and be at first period only ten minutes late. (Like, every day. It's amazing I didn't get in trouble more often.) In college, I took a full course load, worked two jobs, ran five miles every day, got drunk nearly every night, and still managed to write when the rest of the town was asleep. I'm not saying I produced good work, but at least I could get it up. I had more energy than a coked-up seven-year-old boy.

Folks often lament that they "had so much energy" when they were young. These people are usually in their forties or fifties. What they don't tell you is that the torpor starts as soon as you trade in your Applebee's khakis for a fugly J.C. Penney suit. When you're twenty-two, not forty-two. Before you've had kids, before you've bought a condo, before you've really put that energy and wakefulness toward whatever big-effing-dream you had.

I still have insomnia, but I no longer have the energy for insomnia. It's not a virtue anymore, it's a curse. Instead of twenty-one productive waking hours a day, I have twenty-four hours of foggy confusion. Because I need to eat, pay rent, and go to happy hours, I have to keep a job. Keeping a job requires sleep, and so I've been forced to develop strategies to put myself to sleep, from breathing techniques to visualizing strange-colored animals. (The how-to: Close your eyes and say in your mind: Green bunny. Once a clear and detailed picture of a green bunny appears, move on to, say, purple tiger.)

And about a year ago I developed a very successful strategy: Build my dream house in my mind, room-by-room, in excruciating detail. Occasionally this exercise is distracting because I become depressed at my chances of ever owning this home. But, usually I don't get past the Italian tile and brick kitchen before I fall asleep, which translates to twenty-five minutes from the start of the exercise to snoring and sleepy ass-scratching. Before this, I had never been able to fall asleep in just twenty-five minutes.

But now I'm down to five minutes. FIVE MINUTES!--without four Strongbows. Right now the four of you reading this are asking, How Katie? How on earth have you reduced your time by Impressive%? (I tried to do the math but I don't think 212% is the correct answer.) What forward-thinking and creative technique have you pioneered?

I'll tell you, but I'm going to preface it with: I think it's ironic. (I can never really be sure with irony.)

The new technique involves trying to stay awake. How is that for reverse . . . psychosis? I've been beckoning, inviting, my insomnia, which has written some of my favorite things, in order to work through the first paragraph of my book in my mind. I call it mind-writing (catchy, eh?). Mind-writing allows ideas to grow like weeds in the fertile soil of your soul. Weeds are an integral component of the Garden of Ideas. Weeds can be identified and eradicated later, because they will have also fertilized big leafy plants of genius! One cannot recognize a flower without first naming the weeds. Mind-writing shall produce a stunning first line of prose that encapsulates all feeling in the world! The previous four lines will be the blurb for my new self-help book, Mind-Writing Your Way to the Bestseller List.

But I keep falling asleep before I mind-write the first line, let alone the first paragraph. My book is already a snooze and it's not even written.

But I need to write this first line. There is no book without a goddamn beginning. For inspiration, I have reviewed this amazing list of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels as chosen by the American Book Review. Inspired, I will draft at least five (well, if you know me, that means five) first lines to my novel. And then the four of you readers will vote! And then I will pretend to take your input into consideration! Watch this space, as they say somewhere I can't remember.