Socien's Blog

Psychology of my deprivation of sleep: It’s like I am keeping a locomotive, without servicing replacing it, running up and down the tracks. It runs out if it’s tracks. Thanks to my negligence, I blame the weather for softening the ground causing a sagging of the tracks. The tracks may be lacking service, greasing and sandboxing as well but I go and blame civilians who find a locomotive burrowing through their homes at midnight.

There’s gotta be a reason for this deprivation. But I can’t, thanks to my ego and sense of ungrounded invincibility, believe that I am the one to fix. So I created a new drawer on top and put it all the good reasons I have create for this lack of sleep. This is my schedule:

Firstly, there is this hour or two of further watching some reels man, there is no other time to watch them. Besides my service provider is slow during the day and as a member of the proud Bachelor’s Association I take pride in reaping the benefits of bachelorhood in a culture where marriages happen so early like morning fogs—answering to none but the Most High or Mother Nature. The hour is concluded at 2:00hrs, and I sleep afterwards only to find myself turning off the 5:00hrs alarm before it even rings.

There is an adage in my first language “kubata jongwe muromo” (muffling the cock’s mouth). Literary, before watches, domesticated stocks were our time tellers. It’s like I am waking up ahead of the time teller only to silence him. This is a great achievement.

Secondly, before that Reel hour, I take pride in feeding my tiny self, fattening the deprivation-of-sleep plot. “You have to be awake at this time, man,” I take courage in motivating myself like a European army being commanded into battle, a sword pointing battlewards, “no one would welcome a lazy and sleep full short person.” Man at 1.64 metres you are not tiny. This is how tall Napoleon was and he went on to conquer all of Europe and ended up in Exile at Elba. Emperors come in short packages. They are rejected in some instances, like the one I remember when I almost couldn’t get a job as a security guard as I am short.

In my relationship-building history, I once approached a girl Ashley (real name). For three months I tried. But she relegated me to a friendship zone (and I decided to further make us strangers) because I was some five centimetres shorter than her. Worse, she likes wearing heels. Do any of you kids watch Game of Thrones? It was going to take one man a pedestal to kiss the bride. Yeah, I had similar plans for our wedding. I needed a ring and a stool for her.

Thirdly, before the plot fattening phase, I usually have my ARM64 old Windows Tablet in my hands, reading any pirated content (I promise to buy the original books once I can afford them). A biography Steve Jobs by Isaacson, Helen Keller, All works of Immanuel Kant, Plato, omitting Aristotle for some reason (he lied when he tried physics), Eastern philosophy: Zen, Taoism, African literature: Ngozi-Idichie’s Americanah, Purple Hibiscus, you name it. This is the phase where I feel like I have conquered it all, satisfied. Before its start I am just doing something to secure my slot for depositing my genes into the history cupboard of fossils. I have a girlfriend, man. Hope I will have an offspring with her.

So, fourthly, at 21:00hrs, I call my girlfriend. At the height of my gentlemanly oratory craftsmanship, these calls used to last for more than sixty minutes. Now except the day before yesterday when I dragged up to some fifty minutes. She is worried now that the lack of communication alone will be the ulcer to bring our downfall just like the Spanish resistance did to Napoleon.

Fifthly, I cook and eat. Here I am mostly vegetarian. Unless I am eating out, I find cooking and eating some meat unkind; the reason I love Steve Jobs. Apart from being a cut-throat exec, he was at least a vegetarian in some phases of his life and he ate a lot of apples. He also loved Eastern philosophy, paying a pilgrimage to India for the ultimate Zen enlightenment. He also brought to us an iPhone which I hate but appreciate because without the original one released in 2007, there was no way the then market leadership of Nokia and Blackberry (Pitbull wasted his time rapping about the latter) would have brought us a modern smartphone. The CEO at Nokia laughed hard when he heard the news of a keyboardless phone, a new kid in the town.

Before cooking and eating. I would have read more and more. Sometimes like the day before yesterday, I would find myself struggling (with success) to find where to slot in the bath session, a rite that is supposed to cleanse my external shell, the one that covers the flesh before death and decay comes. It is hard to imagine that I will be manure to some branchystegia vegetation in the future. While I try to be vegan, trees have planned to eat me like that at the end of my life cycle. Vegetation is farming me.

It seems I am occupied down to every second. I miss visits to the restroom sometimes. I brush my teeth at midnight since I have a meal around that time. I forget to call Momma. I am also worried that if I call her other than attending to detail about us breathing and going through our daily lives I will be asked if I have called Billy. Each call is a court session where I am not to be represented but proven wrong. I feel guilty when I call. I try to call twice a week. We meet in the middle. We call it a week after four calls.

She is a widow now. Staying alone in a house that’s considered very big where I come from. She can feel a little bit Okay when we call. But somehow I am struggling to feel okay when she does. Whatever the case, I am wrong. That’s what I am trying to correct by staying awake.

But there is a glitch in this system I have created. I spend the day, trying to get to my full thrust. I feel that I am not keeping all my brain’s functions awake. I try a bath. I come out of it almost collapsing. I lie to myself, you have not eaten yet. I eat. I still feel the force of gravity pulling me down more than what Newtown stipulated it would. Newton didn’t give gravity a spec sheet this rich.

I am getting to a point where I would rather be hungry, and fast for days while in control of my sleep. Without sleep the mind is like water agitated, turbid. A Western Taoist, Alan Watts, recommends in his Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking, “We must begin by being in the frame of mind in which it can be understood. You cannot force yourself into this frame of mind any more than you can smooth disturbed water with your hand.”

I don’t feel like I am trapped. Yet to find this clarity, I need to feel as trapped as I can. The starting point is realising that my water is disturbed, then let it settle down to its innate state on its own. But I don’t feel trapped. I somehow feel like I am on the right side like the locomotive I just put in the first paragraph.

The beginning point of a journey, in my case the beginning of finding some sleep, is easily found when you realise that you are lost. When living in the knowledge that you are lost, getting lost further is productive rather than counter-productive. He who realises the need to walk on a journey to self-correction/discovery has taken a headstart even when walking reverse-wards.