magritteI had terrible insomnia when I was a teenager. Stayed up for four days straight once! Not a pleasant experience: first you get the auditory hallucinations (sounds like a radio is on somewhere in the house, but you can’t seem to find the radio); then you get the visual hallucinations (little creatures running this way and that in your peripheral vision). I was sent to numerous doctors, given numerous prescriptions for sleeping pills, but a definitive diagnosis of the root cause of the problem eluded all and sundry. But then, out of the blue, a magical solution fell into my lap: a friend of mine from Argyle Academy lent me two of those New Age relaxation CDs (pretty sure it was part of a series entitled Sounds of Nature). Regardless, the two I had were called Sounds of the Rainforest and Thunderstorm. At this point, I should probably tell you two things about 16-year-old me: (1) I loved rain. (2) I hated bacon.

Though I loved listening to both of the CDs, the Thunderstorm CD was especially amazing. No joke: it was like a magic trick: put me to sleep like a baby. Rarely did I last more than ten minutes. As a direct consequence of this CD filled with the sounds of falling rain, my insomnia was cured, completely cured, for a little over six months. It was glorious. No longer was I exhausted and grumpy all day long. I had energy and creativity and a joie-de-vivre that had been notably absent for about two years. But then, once again, out of the blue, the magical solution that had fallen into my lap was unceremoniously taken from me, albeit inadvertently, by my little sister. One night, as I was listening to the CD and drifting off to sleep, my sister Felicity walked into my bedroom without knocking and said, in a matter-of-fact manner: “Wow, that really sounds like bacon sizzling on a stove.”

She wasn’t trying to be mean or malicious. She was simply stating what had just occurred to her. And I’m sad to report that she was right. It really did sound like bacon sizzling on a stove. The Thunderstorm CD no longer worked for me, not that night, or any other night, though I tried dozens and dozens of times. I tried to will myself to forget what she had said about the bacon, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. Every time I tried to focus on the sweet sounds of the rain, I’d see, instead, a big fat pervert with a hairy back and a wife-beater, staring at me lasciviously whilst cooking bacon on a stove. Every once in a while he’d lift some of the blackened bacon up with a nasty grease-stained spatula and say (in something approximating a Polish accent): “Hey, you want some?”

I didn’t sleep well for another two years. Alas, Nietzsche was right about illusion: “Everything which is good and beautiful depends upon illusion: truth kills—it even kills itself (insofar as it realizes that some sort of error is necessarily its foundation).”

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Dear Morning Person: We don’t hate you because you’re a morning person; we hate you because you expect everyone to be a morning person. Night owls let morning people sleep whenever they want to; but morning people rarely reciprocate. Morning people are like straight people who are super judgy about everybody who’s not straight. A friend of mine who used to tend bar in Baltimore got so sick of his dad’s morning-person moralism that he started calling his dad at 3:00 a.m. (when he got home from work). After his dad was woken up from a sound sleep for the fourth or fifth time, he got the message.

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There are iconic images that remain burned into your memory; this, for me, is one of them: the Buddha is sitting calmly in lotus position, a beatific smile stretches across his angelic face. We see that he’s beset on all sides by menacing enemies: monsters, demons, deformed animals. They’re all, at one and the same time, hurling weapons and abuse at The Enlightened One. Darts dipped in poison sail through the air. Flaming arrows fly towards his heart. A mighty javelin inches its way to his forehead. But he remains thoroughly unscathed! As the deadly weapons near the Buddha, they’re all magically transformed into flowers, beautiful wild flowers, which fall gently to the ground around him as he sings, sings to his enemies: “Let fly your fiery darts, sweet enemy, sweet friend! Say what you will, do your worst; it matters not. So many flowers: flowers at my feet. And my, how they fly, in the afternoon sky! You’re not even done, but I’ve already won. Just turned your poison words, into sweet singing birds.”

—John Faithful Hamer, The Myth of the Fuckbuddy (2018)