My extended vacation came to an abrupt and somewhat unexpected end today when I suddenly found myself returning to work on a shortish notice. This came after having whiled away the preceding six weeks sleeping as long as I liked in the mornings, and that’s been increasingly long lately, with an additional bonus of having spent most of last week in London with a time difference of two hours. So now I needed to adjust myself to getting up 4-6 hours earlier than I had been grown used to and knew this would be impossible. Here are some of the amazingly large assortment of topics that rally around in your head when you know you’ll never be able to fall asleep:

-The fact that you’ll never be able to sleep
-The importance of not dwelling too much on the aforementioned fact to avoid panic
-The fact that it’s too warm to fall asleep
-The fact that your neck is stiff and aching because of the drafty hotel room in London
-The fact that your neck continues to ache in every position you change into.
-Sex
-The fact that it’s too cold to fall asleep
-The fact that you’ve been lying there for two hours already
-Random Mötley Crue songs playing over and over in your head (mostly punchlines of choruses because you don’t know their songs that well), because you just read The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx.
-The sudden realization that you forgot to buy flaked oats and are now unable to have oatmeal for breakfast like you usually do when going to work but not while on leisure
-Sex
-The fact that you’re still not sleepy at all and it’s 2.15AM
-The fact that this could be a good time to try and finish that pending lyric that’s been bothering you
-The sudden reminder of how futile it has been on similar occasions in the past when you might have been able to complete a lyric but probably haven’t and in any case had forgotten all about it by the morning
-Sex
-”He’s the one they call Dr. Feeeelgoood, he’s the one (*can’t remember how it goes on*)”
-The predicament of whether of not you’d be able to make a living of translating books from English to Finnish
-The fact that you wouldn’t
-The unsureness of do you or do you not have it in you to be a translator
-The fact that you can’t decide between a Russel Hoban and an Iain Banks novel to try your hand at translating
-Sex
-The fact that if you empty your mind completely of all thoughts you’ll surely fall asleep in no time at all
-The effort of keeping your mind devoid of thoughts and the feeling of starting to fall asleep
-The sudden surge of the chorus of a Mötley Crue song ”Girls Girls Girls” in the loudspeakers of your mind
-The fact that if you fell asleep right now you could still catch three hours of sleep
-The pain in the neck and further half an hour of searching for a comfortable position to sleep in and failing.
-A sudden idea for a great new arrangement for a Sinisthra song that’s already been recorded.
-The fact that you will spend the whole night lying awake.

And then, suddenly, the alarm clock goes off at 5.15AM, you jerk awake to it so you must have slept for a bit anyway, you get up, would like to have some oatmeal but can’t, then you head off to work and don’t feel particularly tired for the whole day.

Here’s me, not enjoying my cigar at all. Presented here only because an entry without any pictures looks so dull.


THIS WEEKS’ BOOKS OF CHOICE:
”The Heroin Diaries” by Nikki Sixx. Found this from my favourite second hand bookstore in London for a very friendly price and read it through in a few days. Very captivating book, brutally and at times disgustingly honest and graphic. I’ve never liked Mötley Crue’s music and that’s not likely to change but I almost checked some of their videos from YouTube after reading this book. I read ”The Dirt” when it came out several years ago (The guitarist of my former band translated it to Finnish) and might leaf through it again sometime soon while I still have this diary fresh in my mind. There’s something quite fascinating in debauchery and self destruction of this level, especially since the people involved have survived to talk about it. There were some very sincere entries written by a person who is suffering from depression but not fully realising it.