Tag Archives: alarm clocks

Non-fiction

What the Hell?

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I got up around five in the morning. My alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. It was a spooky jingle, although it wasn’t intended to be. But any jingle at that hour would sound that way. It would’ve been preferable to sleep in, but that isn’t my wiring. I’ve been a light sleeper for as long as I’ve known myself.

I take showers with a candle lit in my bathroom, but my lighter ran out of fluid, so there was no candle this morning before the sun came out. I had to take a shower in almost total darkness.

I sat outside on the curb after my shower. It was still dark. I wore my headphones and listened to my music. I forgot what songs were playing. My music is usually on shuffle, which doesn’t always work. I’ve noticed on any day the app likes to play different songs from the same artist close together. For instance, if a Soundgarden song comes on, another Soundgarden song will come on about three songs later. The same will happen for any other artist. It doesn’t bother me too much. Just makes me wonder why it’s called shuffle if it has a pattern.

Anyway, when I was sitting on the curb, my iPhone rang. It scared me. Who the hell would be calling me at 5:30 in the morning? The call was from Seattle. They’d called twice. The first call had gone straight to my voicemail, but they called again. This time, it rang. I waited for the ringing to end and to hear a voicemail. I was afraid to find out who it was. It was nineteen seconds long. I couldn’t make out where a lady with a thick accent was calling from. Her voice was muffled. Somehow I could hear what she’d said about my email. So whoever it was had sent me an email about my delivery. But what delivery so early in the morning? Who the hell would deliver a package at that time? I checked my email but didn’t find anything. But I checked my other email and saw it was from Amazon. The courier couldn’t get inside my building. The funny thing was I sat in front of my apartment and never noticed one of those large, awkward Amazon vans. I guess you could call them vans. I’m not sure what type of vehicle it is. But that’s not important. What is important is why Amazon would choose to have their couriers deliver any package so early, especially my colon cleansing pills. Don’t get me wrong. I need them, but not that badly. I still have a few pills left to take before the new bottle arrives. I’m not sure what I would do without them to keep things going. The email said, SORRY WE MISSED YOU. WE WILL TRY ANOTHER TIME. Let them try. Like I said, I wasn’t that desperate.

So I walked on to the coffee shop and made it there about ten minutes later. I grabbed my coffee and eggs and wrote longhand for almost a half hour. Now I sit on the patio during sunrise and write this blog thing. My browser said I have six compromised passwords from a data breach from five months ago. Shit. Now I have to change a bunch of passwords. Lucky me. I don’t know how long that message had been there. Those hackers have a full-time job hacking people’s accounts. I can’t keep up with them. There was a data breach last week involving my social, but I learned almost everyone’s social was exposed in the breach. What am I going to do?

Non-fiction

Insomnia

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I went to bed at nine o’clock last night, woke up at one o’clock this morning for no reason, and couldn’t go back to sleep. It was time to give up, crawl out of bed, and take a walk outside. The temperature was easily over eighty degrees, but the heat wasn’t what bothered me because it was cool in my apartment. What made me lose sleep were thoughts I couldn’t control–thoughts about the past and future, regrets over what I did and what I never did.

I was never a good sleeper. Some people sleep just fine, from the minute they go to bed to the second their alarm goes off. I can’t relate to those people. They usually snore, keeping everyone else awake.

My college roommate used to snore, and it drove me insane. Sometimes I thought about that scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when the patient smothered the Jack Nicholson character with a pillow. Now I would never do that, but man, there were thoughts.

When I have insomnia, I want the rest of the world to have it so I won’t feel alone. It’s so quiet outside that I believe everyone is sleeping except for me, which is untrue. A lot of people lose sleep. I read that one out of three adults suffers from it, and it can lead to obesity and diabetes, not to mention anxiety and depressive disorders.

There had to be a way to combat the insomnia. I watched YouTube videos while I was up until three o’clock before I tried to go back to sleep. My brain just wouldn’t shut off. Then my alarm sounded at five o’clock in the morning, when I usually get up. I hate the song that plays on my iPhone. The piano is too haunting, like a ghost is going to crawl out from under the bed. It vaguely sounds like the theme to The Exorcist. I turn it off right away and jump out of bed. Sometimes my hand, with a mind of its own, hits the snooze accidentally so the song repeats. But all of the other songs are just as bad. I can’t win with the alarm because it sucks to be awakened by anything, such as a chainsaw outside of my window when someone is chopping up a tree, or a bunch of cackling crows that make me want to throw a coffee can at them and watch them fly away.

Now I’m at the coffee shop, half dead, and I have to work today. It’s going to be another long week. I just hope that tonight I can sleep the whole night through.