On insomnia

I can't...bloody...sleep. Why can't these bloody profound creative thoughts come to me when I'm in a position to do something about them, and not when I have an eight-hour day to look forward to tomorrow. Even if a large enough number of monkeys working for a long enough time can produce Hamlet, my forehead whacking the keyboard every minute for eight hours straight is unlikely to produce a workable web page. Maybe it's because night is so much less...distracting, than the day. I wish being nocturnal was a reasonable mode of existence for a human being in New York City. Come to think of it...it is. Okay, fine - I wish being nocturnal was a reasonable mode of existence for me. I hate walking around half the day like a drone, and when I'm finally feeling up to speed, it's past dinner time. AND WHERE THE HELL HAS MY COPY OF "BACK TO METHUSELAH" GONE?!

I think it's also because more often than not, I'm alone at night. And though I'm not even aware that it's happening, my shields go down. And everything I'm afraid of thinking during the day just flood in. I don't know. It seems like I don't know half the things I'm saying nowadays. Particularly on this online blog. God I'm tired...I wish I could just go to sleep. Instead, I shall post a poem that I wrote a long time ago.

"Mother and Sons"

I am told that life is small,
and I have heard that life is cheap.
A worthless bauble among all
the treasures of the galaxies.
A speck of dust in the great black room.
Against the vast expanse,
not even a curiosity.

I am told we are a whisper, lost
against the tempest of time.
A forgotten word in the dusty library.
When we die, none will remember us,
no one will weep.
We will be as a forgotten memory.

Ah, but if you die, my dearests,
I will weep.
I will weep for the lost songs and
the lost poems, the endless unwritten stories
that will never come to be.
I will grieve for the lost sunsets and
the lost clouds, the great designs
that no one will see.
I will mourn the seas in their fallen seashells,
the unheard sighs of the abandoned trees.

I will weep for wonders left
underdiscovered.
I will lament the starry sky
and the spaces untouched by your curious hands.
I will cry for your vanished lives.

I will weep for the lost worlds,
for the sum of years from all who have lived,
surpasses the life of time.

For that loss, my dearests,
I shall weep.

The sentiment is a mite trite, but I still hold to it. It seems to me particularly true when I look at the great skyscrapers of New York City, gaze at the myriad sparkling lights of these huge structures, knowing each erected with not only the effort of man and machine, but the accumulated knowledge of ten thousand years. Each building contains dozens, hundreds of people, most with at least as many years behind them as I have, and each with a story to tell twenty or more years in the making. Each with a story as different from the other, and also as similar, as the moon is to a fuzzy white peach. Perhaps it's insomnia making me excessively romantic, but when I really get down and think about it, those stories and those lives seem to me of paramount importance...every bit as important as any sun or galaxy of stars. A whole universe, for that matter, seen through the eyes of one person.