Needs - Sleep

You know one thing I hate? One thing I hate more than any other single discrete thingum of slime in this whirling world (for the moment)?


Need.

I find it is so weak to need. But what good is my opinion? The needs I grapple with most (sleep, food, ego-stroking, rest) think my opinions are largely irrelevant. Our needs affect us regardless of our other urges. The needs fight the wants. Sometimes they grow weary from fighting, battle starved for love, and fall together. They confuse each other, want dresses up as need, addiction gestates as their inbred child, obsession his twin brother, dedication the ugly duckling triplet. Dedication, a beauteous white eagle, shrieks at me to write every day.

How I owe the idea of need then, when it gave birth to my quest to write. Be it that way, let me lay tribute to these needs of mine, the best way I can: writing each one a profile.

>> Need Profile- Sleep

Sleep is a particularly maddening thing. When I'm in the middle of work, or more likely in the midst of fancy, the shutdown starts. Eyes become steel garage doors, their motors constantly drawing them down. This particularly happens to me after work is over, when my frail body feels need the most.

Sleep is like fat lover to a cold sailor, comforting, lulling hedonism. To its credit, it is one of the most peaceful escapes I know. But life continues beyond sleep. People who aren't sleeping still want to do things, want experience. I cannot provide it such services when I sleep. To compound the woes, I can't provide those same services as well as I could either if I don’t take these regular, tick-tock scheduled breaks. I can't sleep-write.

Sleep taunts, dragging me softly into my murky pool, to its rawest nucleus, churning with radioactive ideas glowing disorganized. I see such things that are so cool, so enlivening to my spirit that I try to grab them and put them in jars. But they slip through the fingers, the cracks, out of the vacuum lines; no matter what I do to sequester them. Sometimes I can't write them down quick enough before they are gone, like airs of perfume on the wind.

Sleep is a dangerous recreational drug for me. Yet what haze comes from the days that I wake in a storm brewing over the pool? What to think of those days of morning glory nectar where breakfast lays cold?

I'll probably be too busy writing to appreciate them. I give my thanks to those sunshiny days, in advance. Today was one such morning, ironically enough. Maybe I’ll get enough sleep to silence all arguments. Sleep does that well.