Sun of the Sleepless

Sun Of The Sleepless - To The Elements

This is what the temperature change across a period of sleep looks like. She turned the computer screen toward him and pointed to an inverted peak. Your sleep-temperature charts follow this pattern consistently.

She clicked on image after image to demonstrate, with just-so simplicity, the sublime regularity of predictive science. He could have sworn that deep inside he felt his body shift into alignment and become regular. When the image appeared on the screen she watched his reaction. Where was the inverted peak? There was the dip, but it was hardly like the steep, deep drop he had seen in all the other graphs. The line was jagged. He was a volatile stock value. It was pointless to feign surprise. Her surety left no room for it. You were told that you cannot drink alcohol during the experiment. He returned home defeated.

Now they were on to him. They would watch him. They would call him in for extra random checks. They would follow him. It was fortunate that the Byron documents arrived in the mail that day. He opened the large bubble wrap folder and pulled out a bundle of photocopied articles. He skimmed the first one, growing uneasy. It must be fatigue. But it was difficult to resist eyeing the other documents, too. Unease accumulated until it became full-on panic. What were all these words? He got the gist, but was that good enough? He managed to calm down. He talked himself through it. What did he know about Byron?

That he had run off to Italy to avoid scandal at home. That his purported affair with his half-sister and his queer loves made it difficult to navigate British society. Byron was a romantic, in every sense of the word, who pursued his desires and his writing was inflected with them. Maybe the press on Byron would reflect this, and, maybe, knowing this would help fill in the blanks in the story. He had a zoo in his Venetian palace—dogs, cats, monkeys, a badger, a falcon, a crow, and a fox.

Once, he decided to take a shortcut home and swam fully dressed across the Grand Canal. To be able to fill your hours with life lived however you choose—what kind of writing would that inspire? How could any reader separate the living from the writing in the case of Byron? The first week of the experiment was over and he was called in to join the other participants in the much-anticipated all-nighter at the lab.

He arrived at sundown to find only two fanny-packed women around his age waiting in a large and windowless garage-like space. He recognized them from college. One of them, like him, had been an Anthropology major. The Anthropology major sighed with an air of defeat.

The other woman had surrender written on her forehead. He knew what that was. And neither seemed to know anything more than he did about what was going to happen next—not that knowing mattered. When two technicians appeared from a windowed booth in the far corner, the three volunteers looked at them resignedly.

Sun of the Sleepless - To the Elements Review | Angry Metal Guy

So your task is to stay awake for the next 36 hours. You are here together to make that easier. The woman spoke while a man stood beside her, his eyes moving slowly and impassively from volunteer to volunteer. The rules are as follows: The three of you will sit there. She pointed to a circular beige laminate table with three chairs.

Between the chairs stood three towers of LED lights. You can talk, you can play games, you can do what you like, but you must keep your eyes open and your hands must be on the table at all times. Every hour, you can take one ten-minute break, during which you can use the bathroom, or smoke a cigarette, but you cannot sleep.

When the 36 hours are over, you can return home and go to sleep. They took their places at the table and someone in the booth switched on the light towers. The three of them looked at each other, as if about to say something, but, strangely, they held back. Were they too afraid to show their alarm? So it was rummy, hearts, poker, and pinochle, which became their favorite.

Sun Of The Sleepless - Neunter November

They played and played and played until sometime in the middle of the night they started to relax. Naturally they exchanged tales of humiliation. The three of them learned from each other the circumstances that had brought them to their present ignominy. Crippling student debt, unpreparedness for the job market, an intellectual formation that invited rigorous questioning, but provided little insight into how to live in this world.

It was all too familiar. They turned the hours they were dealt into a delicate formation. The non-stop card games opened a timespace where artful strategies, subtle communication and chance bound them to a communal challenge that, because it was never-ending—or at least it felt like it was—would never be zero-sum. They germinated an intimacy on their own terms, even if they knew their bodies were networked by the same grand apparatus commanded by people and institutions they would never face.

Maybe it was this comforting complicity that inspired the other Anthropology major to venture into new territory. Instead, they, all three, looked down at their pinochle hands and focused on their next play. After just a few more plays, the atmosphere lightened again and they were back to their comic banter.

They even made fun of each other. Making it through this middle phase of the experiment with grace felt like an achievement to be proud of. Their unique bond could have provided solace for the week to come, the week of the night shift. Back home at last, nothing was more important than the solitude and silence of sleep, to metabolize the everyday. Dutifully, he set his alarm for 8pm, filled out a survey extremely foggy, extremely sleepy, zero alertness, zero anxiety, zero cheer , checked in with the phone-activated computer, turned off the light in his blacked-out room, and closed his eyes.

At once, deep slumber dragged him under. Sun of the sleepless!

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When the alarm went off, he awoke disoriented. He peeked at the world outside the black plastic on his windows and saw that it was night. He heard the voices of his housemates and followed them to the kitchen downstairs. The air was thick with savory aromas. Baked chicken and steamed vegetables? He made himself coffee and brought it to the living room. He looked in vain for the newspaper but guessed it had long been read and thrown out, so he just sat by the window and stared into the moonlit night.

The fog of sleep slowly lifted and the marathon pinochle games started coming back. They have to hear about this. He went to join the others, but they had already finished dinner and each was winding down in their rooms, watching TV or reading. I had a dream, which was not all a dream. Something happens during the night shift. Wonderment and existential doubt intensify. The days are vanquished and you think you see the everyday for what it is. There, on the outside, the silence and stillness come alive, and you see the edges of what you hitherto experienced as a seamless power.

The regulation of sleep and wakefulness in the interest of capital. And so went the week, with nightly days and daylit nights. Conviviality and commensality were lost to him.

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He never learned how the findings of the experiment were ultimately used, but it is likely that the experiment contributed to the growing business of regulating sleep and wakefulness by way of pharmaceuticals. The medical treatment of sleep disorders has since become focused on the aberrant nature of individual patients to meet the inevitable nature of everyday life, with its rhythms of work, school and family.

He started on the Adderall. Was it only a coincidence that it was during the fieldwork for his new project? His drug was amphetamine salts and theirs was methamphetamine. It was overwhelmingly sad. People living in rural Missouri, more than anywhere else in the US, were trying to make ends meet by working longer hours at the factory, in trucking, in cement work—in every difficult, low-paying job.

They manufactured methamphetamine in their homes because when they took it, it gave them the energy and motivation to work double and triple shifts, and go for days without sleeping. Meth floods the brain with dopamine while also inhibiting its reuptake, creating hours and hours of anticipatory excitement of good things to come. It was like manufactured hope. Meth is easy to make, and, when there was something left over, to sell. People could earn some extra income. Many said that using the drug made producing it even easier because it kept them alert to potential explosions and police busts.

When they wanted to sleep, they used heroin and other opioids to come down. The pharmaceuticalization of sleep and wakefulness, the temporal regulation of bodies, had insinuated itself into the most impoverished late industrial regions of the U. It created a world where people came undone under the rhythmic imperative to exploit their embodied resources to assume increasing levels of risk.

Those homes, landscapes and bodies bore the most visible marks of the dominant temporal regimes. Getting the prescription was shockingly easy. But having his feelings of depression sidelined to make room for some other disorder felt like a slight. There was something bogus about ADD.

It was steeped in an ideology of productivity and the diagnosis suggested its own remedy, to entrain your bodily rhythms to dominant political and economic temporal regimes. Professors were bad patients. Adderall was fantastic in the beginning. All at once, the fog lifted and there was a clearing. Depression was now just an obstacle and it could simply be waved away or barreled through.

Anticipation was in the skin. It was in each choppy breath. It was in the bones, the ready-to-move limbs, like that kick that long-time meth users missed from the dirty, old-school crank they reminisced about. Heart beating hard…How did his palms get so sweaty? Adderall made writing about meth users easier, and faster, but there was an uneasy chemical proximity. He got up earlier and earlier and worked later and later. At both ends of the lengthening shift, there was night and night. Every sentence, every word makes a difference. Composing, decomposing and composing again—it became something, and, then, something else, but was it crystallizing?

He was no more sober than the people he was writing about. And the writing was intoxicated with hope and melancholy, much like the lives of the people he got to know. Could the writing do them justice? What could writing, and only writing, do for anyone? To be able to live the hours however you choose—what kind of writing would that inspire? August 3, , 7AM.

Heartfelt black metal for when the sun goes down

What was happening this morning? Irritating that the effects of the medication stopped being predictable, stopped making the mornings predictable. The pills had more or less eliminated these crapshoot days where either work was interesting enough to even be exciting and useful enough to even seem important, or where there was no good reason to be doing it at all. But the pills had put a stop to all that, for years—until recently.

With the Adderall, it was like the wires were finally properly grounded, closing the circuit. Just feeling the circuit was revelatory: But now the cruel roulette wheel was spinning again. How long was it going to last? There was a deadline. Open the computer calendar: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. September , 6am to 4pm—no, better make that all day.

Was this a work schedule or a scheduled malaise? Depressive drudgery and threadbare concentration: There are people who scale back their hopes of meeting the world and there are those who diminish themselves. Who made up this structure of failure anyway? Have to piss again.

How was he supposed to get any writing done if it made him go all the time? While midstream, a thought, a short, silent burst of fireworks. That the research will turn on you. Yes, it was so true. Of course inspiration came when it was inconvenient. Sitting back down in front of the computer.

Brush a fleck of cuticle off the keyboard. Posture—neck and shoulder will be ruined again. The chair is too high. Have to get the wireless keyboard. It was about—biting a fingernail—about writing about depression. Fingers slapping keyboard, arms arching, neck craning forward. Sitting up straight now. He stopped the Adderall. Now there was dragging anhedonia. Caring about anything took too much energy. Understanding why you should care took even more. This was a new feeling. Drifting, sinking, falling, no edges, no resistance, like an embrace.

Was this how it was before the Adderall? Or, did going off it actually enhance sleep, making it better than ever? Sleep was not nonlife, but constituent of life itself. It was good to be off it. At least to know that you were clean. Dato, his son, has been in constant trouble with the law. He apparently loves his father but it is clear that neither father nor son understand each other. Dato is involved in vaguely criminal dealings although he and his criminal friends spend their hours together in an automobile workshop.

In the end, Dato is the only one that believes in his father. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from " https: Use dmy dates from September Articles containing Georgian-language text All stub articles. Views Read Edit View history.

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