Insomnia

2am…

I spend much of my life awake, most of it when I should not be.  Don’t fret, I am also almost invariably awake when I should be.  Sleep occupies little of my life, but most of my thoughts.  In the night my thoughts are febrile little beasts.  I gather them up in the morning, like a shepherd might pull together a flock of nocturnal blancmanges, and try to slop them back into the appropriate vessels.  Writing, for me, is like assembling a Haynes Manual for my head. 

Back in the day, I would face down the night and write with no intention other than to be funny¹: no axe to grind, no tale to tell – or at least no moral to latch onto it – just a million jokes in my head and the need to release them for the world’s admiration.  You would not believe the sleep I lost in letting them go, nor how many of them, like maladjusted pigeons, came straight back home to roost.  I don’t do it so much now: the bagful of jokes thing.  I don’t know why.  It could be my age I suppose.  Somehow I need things to make sense these days, but I’m trying to get over it.  Logic is the death of comedy I know.  If you need to explain a joke, it is almost certainly not funny.  If you can explain a joke, it is definitely not funny.

Anyone who has ever attempted to define what makes anything amusing is trudging along the road to insanity.  Time and place has a part to play (funerals and bankruptcy hearings seldom offer the best of audiences) as does the way you tell ‘em: we all have the capacity to bugger up a perfectly good joke.  Don’t worry, it won’t cost you friends: what on earth would they laugh at if you weren’t so inept?  Anyway, nobody actually tells jokes any more, do they?  Jokes are last year’s funny.  The chickens have stopped crossing the road. 

I am by nature a joker and occasionally, like everybody else in this imperfect world, I say things that I instantly regret and I instantly say things that I later regret.  My brain clicks over things that I am, at times, not quick enough to manage.  It makes decisions over which I have no control, long before I am prepared to make them.  I am what used to be called quick-witted, and the problem with that is that the filters often do not click into place as quickly as my big, stupid mouth.  Age has given me the capacity to see it coming.  Discretion waves, like Jenny Agutter’s red bloomers, in the face of the disaster-bound express.

There are times when I wish I could be more forthright, but it’s difficult.  It’s not the way I was made.  People (my grandma in particular) would tell you that I do not have a malicious bone in my body, and I know they are right, because I am a jellyfish.  My entire capacity to cause pain lies solely in my inadvertent aptitude to stand on other people’s toes in the ice cream queue and to trap my dick in my own zip².  I am the clown whose car refuses to fall apart, whose bow-tie refuses to spin, whose trousers are already full of custard.  I am the bloody idiot in the bowler hat and the brightly checked suit that absolutely everybody finds annoying.  The red nose is all my own.

So I think that what has happened to me lately is that I have stopped attempting to write jokes that nobody finds funny, aware, as I am, that an unfunny joke is nothing but polemic.  (I know this, because I just looked it up,

after dismissing my usual method of splitting words I do not understand into constituent parts in order to get the drift, e.g. pole = stick or stand and mic = microphone.  Polemic is a microphone stand.  I have spent years thinking that I am full of shit, only to discover that I am actually full of microphone stands.)  It is a sobering thought.  Like a glass of coke and a fried egg sandwich, it shouldn’t work, but often it does³.

My younger life was shaped by Spike Milligan, Monty Python and Mad Magazine’s Dave Berg.  I spent many years trying to find The lighter Side of things.  Only recently have I grown to understand that most of them don’t have one.  Myquest to try to find the right thing to say leads me, as ever it did, to 3am and camomile tea, to 4am and a half-lit tryst with a pen and a notepad, to 5am and coffee that stains the teaspoon, with Marmite on toast.  Marmite is the last surrender.  Sleep and yeast extract are like Abbott and Costello, they look good on paper, but in real life they are totally incompatible. 

One of these stubbornly long nights I will stumble across the chicken that did cross the road and I will ask why it did it.  Hopefully I will stay awake long enough to hear the answer…

¹ I reserve the right to believe that I once was.
² Definitely not in the ice cream queue.
³ In my own (happily limited) experience, the only fully guaranteed hangover cure.

Where does it come from?
Where does it go?
Flowing over your skin
Walking and talking
Dancing ‘til dawn
When you just can’t give in to
Insomnia…  Insomnia – Wishbone Ash (Martin Turner)