by Angela Perez

Lately, I’ve been grappling with copious amounts of big and little stuff, significant existential questions (life, death, career, transition), as well as super petty things like being annoyed by women wearing cowboy boots with sundresses. The weight of all of these flotsam and jetsam tests the strength of my load-bearing wall.

I just need a little bit more self-healing than I usually do, which is okay given the circumstances of the pile-on of life crises these last few years, which we all inevitably gotta go through if we are the ones who get to live. I have lived by the creed: toughen up, handle your own problems -people are dying and suffering in ways more gruesome than me lingering over a friend’s death, or my dog having diabetes, or that hangnail that keeps irritating my right pointer finger. When I think of my interal anguish in those terms, well, writing, drinking coffee, and sleeping ain’t a bad way to go about living.

Justifiable in the grand scheme of things or not, to cope, I’ve been sleeping a lot more lately. As in, down-with-flu-don’t-know-what-year-it-is-Rip-Van-Winkle sleeping. There are stretches of time where I’ll spend a while writing down all of my thoughts and musings, read a bit, and then go back to bed, sleeping off and on in a haze for days. I’ll admit, I’ve felt kind of guilty about not being as productive as I could be.

But then I read a vignette by George Carlin and realized: THE CREATURE IS REGENERATING ITSELF.

Carlin notes:

People say, ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ as if it were nothing. But it’s really a bizarre activity. ‘For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.’

If you didn’t know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you’d seen.

They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the ‘mind adventures’ got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren’t unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.’

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a science fiction movie. And whisper, ‘The creature is regenerating itself.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings