sleepy little pill

On the topic of insomnia again, I'm back on the no sleep kick. While some would think that being a "night owl" is somehow lucky and fun, what with all of the interesting late night programming and all, I would argue that it is only beneficial in a collegiate or jobless situation. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of wasted time in a zombie state and several hundred extra dollars a year spent on coffee.

I've received a few recommendations recently, for aids that will allow me to both sleep and wake "naturally" and leave me rested as opposed to having a sleepy-over the next day. I find the use of the word natural, very creative. This is one of the stupidest things I've ever read. For people who really have sleep problems, do they think we haven't checked into all of this already? I mean, really. No insomniac I know has not tried every possible trick to get themselves to sleep. Short of stabbing myself in the temple and letting my brain leak out onto my pillow every night, I have put in the fucking effort on this one.

Sadly, even the most safe, over the counter sleep aids cause me extreme drowsiness and leave me operating about 2 - 3 sentences behind the rest of the world the next day. This tends to be problematic when trying to discuss the state of the real estate economy and relevant information with regard to the placement of tens of millions of dollars. Thank god I'm not in the practice of operating heavy machinery or wielding medical tools in surgery. "Uh, oops....you said it was the left leg....right?" "Anyone seen my ju-ju-bes?"

I'm one of a gajillion people dealing with this, though. Our collective stress levels and lack of coping skills have thrown us all into a world dependent on sedatives to sleep and stimulants to wake. Gone is the time of a simple drifting off to a land of happy slumber and restful awakening with joyful rays of sun streaming through the lace curtains each morning. In it's place is the writhing stress of tossing around trying to trick your body into relaxing and rejuvinating itself.

Due to this, there are so many ads out now for prescription grade sleep aids, that you'd think some hippie out there would become incensed and begin leveraging his or her holistic-ness and computer skills to market some sort of pay service. It would be targeted at stress reduction techniques involving body contortion, breathing techniques and strange herbs you've never heard of.

Of course, I must digress that this is America and we would sooooooooooooooo much rather take drugs than deal with our problems. Perhaps the hippies realized this (in between bong rips) and have pre-emptively claimed futility. Perhaps this is another idea that I really should jump on, so that I can make the millions of dollars that the universe owes me, since I already lost out on the road rage thing.

I now think that perhaps I should rally my fellow insomniacs and see if we just can't shift the workday to coincide with our epidemic. If you think about it, the white collar world is probably the largest funder of both the coffee and sedative markets, meaning we have the most authority on what would work well to alleviate the productivity losses associated with our, ahem, disorder. If we shifted the workday, we'd have plenty of good, daylight hours to ease into wakefulness and then we could keep happy hour where it is, and lunchtime would rock. I'm taking this one straight to the top.

I apologize in advance to the pharmaceutical industry for their impending losses, but I'm sure we'll come up with another affliction for them to exploit.