Time

It all begins with a blank page, or a blank screen, but there's nothing more intimidating than the blank look...the one I give myself on a morning like today's.  You can't hurry love, the old song goes.  No sense in rushing, the old saying goes.  And time is neither compressible nor expandable nor malleable.  But you can fuck with it.  You can schlep on board a flight from Europe with your bags full of English cheese and your body full of circadian rhythm and markedly screw up both along the way.  It's too hot in California for Somerset cheddar, and the substance tells you this by an immediate disassociation.  The butterfat migrates towards its home in the Cheddar Gorge, while the solids stay in place, an internal battle raging, and you the prospective cheese eater beginning to lose interest.  As for the circadian rhythm, well, it's gone the way of the rhythm section or the rhythm method, sagging into your guts, draining you...and of what, no one can say.  Where is Circadia anyway?

You can't find it.  And what seems most necessary is certainty and regularity.  Which is why, so-called jetlag being what it is, on night number two when fatigue drops through your abdominal cavity like an elevator, something sprightly and insistent surges upward.  The result is a highly fatigued state of bug eyed consciousness that arrives about three in the morning.  It enters your life like a Jehovah's Witness.  You don't recall opening the door for it, but there it is drinking your drinks and sitting in your sitting room and lounging in your lounge chair.  And it's not going anywhere.  It's going to take its time.  And it's going to take your time.  And the whole thing wouldn't be any sort of problem if you just realized that time cannot be taken.

Instead, you've taken something along the lines of Sominex, one of those over-the-counter sleep tablets that not having the imprimatur of a Merck, somehow seem more low-key.  Drugs, of course, have neither a high nor a low key.  But in Britain, one of them, aspirin, comes attractively packaged in small travel-size packets.  Just don't try to buy more than two.  Three is over the limit, any pharmacist will tell you.  Why?  The occasional suicidal Briton takes an overdose of aspirin.  Which is like trying to drown yourself in the lavatory sink of a 747 and eminently deserving of a Darwin Award.

The problem is that after a Sominex night, which does the approximate the prescribed eight hours, you don't quite wake up.  Your eyes open, the torso straightens to vertical, but a mustiness lies upon the psychic land.  Lorna goes about the morning rituals and offers to strap me into the rowing machine, but the very thought sends me into a swoon.  The solar plexus is drained.  I ask her to come back in a couple of hours.  She does, and by then I'm barely out of the fog.

Some will insist that the problem lies in the choice of drug.  One needs a real professional, prescription-type medication, hangover free and guaranteed to give you a peaceful night.  Thing is, I have some of these sleeping pills.  True, there is no hangover and there's a pleasant zonking out which, don't get me wrong, has its place...such as a berth aboard an overnight train for Glasgow, where the prescription stuff did its job quite well.  But under normal circumstances, when not being jostled and tossed in a Scottish sleeping compartment, there's an important thing missing.  No dreams.  Dreamless sleep.  Which may be okay now and then, but not on a regular basis.  I believe in the Land of Nod.  It really exists, is its own country, the borders expanding on a nightly basis.  Dreams heal and inform us.  I'm not in favor of drugging them.  At least not very often.

So, was it worth it?  The Sominex night, I mean.  What was I trying to accomplish?  I was trying to bypass or short-circuit the jetlag experience.  Which means what?  It means avoiding the waking up in the middle of the night, mind unaccountably buzzing, the sense that things are out of control.  Which they are.  So why not wake up in the middle of the night?  Underneath it all, my circadian rhythm hasn't changed.  Same tempo, same beat.  And why do we need this druggy illusion of control?

Drugs, single-malt whiskey included, can help us kick up our heels, release those Dionysian energies.  The rest of the time they can help prolong life...like Marlou's...regulate what the body can't.  But to me, even when absolutely necessary, they are second rate.  If you hang in there, life will bring something better.  It's pretty rough along the way.  But next time, I'm staring at the ceiling.