List of 50 (13 of 50): LIST DURING WHICH I AM FIRED FROM MY JOB AND THEN FALL SICK INTO THE NEW YEAR

1. Having not slept in four days I felt myself become another person.
2. Each other day half further fumbled; my brain one slight shade darker every waking hour.
3. Changeling. Scrambled.
4. 17 hours of sleep deprivation has been shown to cause a decrease in performance equivalent to a .05% blood-alcohol level.
5. Apparently I've been getting drunk since I was 10.
6. Big brown bags under my eyes even my sister mentions, sighing.
7. Sleep deprivation has been used as a method of interrogating suspected terrorists.
8. Literally just now in the middle of writing another version of list item 8 I got called to my manager's office and was fired from my job.
9. Incidentally, I am certain, the dismissal unrelated to the fact that I spend a large portion of my time at work reading sleep research websites and writing lists in my Gmail browser rather than calling debtors and trying to make them give me money they don't have.
10. Really I'm more mad they interrupted my not-working than anything else.
11. Really I'm just tired.
12. My extremities tingling from lack of sleep.
13. Back at home now, freshly unemployed, on my TV screen in blue-green font on black: Unusable Signal.
14. A phrase I might rightly one day have tattooed on my forehead.
15. And in the next room, my bed, the mattress bent from having flown off of a truck.
16. The subsequent lump causing a sleeper to sink toward the middle.
17. No length of rest coming clean or right, exactly.
18. Voices through the thin walls, outside the window, from rooms overhead.
19. The crud and thump of trains and drunks and sirens. The soft swim of low light and the fan.
20. Exposure to noise at night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn't wake.
21. Circadian. A blob. Buried in myself.
22. A thing absorbing toxins, radiation, static.
23. A thing awake when asleep/asleep when awake.
24. Crack ya skull without penetratin ya skin.
25. My skull enormous, unable to fit in any hat, fat with blabber.
26. The rest of my body slumped and sugared, in need of something new unnamed.
27. A study done in 1998 showed that bright light shown at the backs of a human's knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock.
28. Standing in the bathroom with my pants down and some matches, wishing to hit some sort of trigger.
29. Now returning almost exactly 44 hours after having written list item 27, having spent the last two days in bed.
30. Having fainted twice well after midnight on the day of firing, my body hitting the floor as dead weight, slick with sweat, though likely related to the matches. Likely.
31. Coming to with lips of gibberish. Unable to understand where I am.
32. Unable to understand where I am most any day, it seems.
33. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.
34. My temperature so high this evening my girlfriend worried I was going to burn my brain.
35. Today the first day before the new year, 2007.
36. Some sense of shift. Some inner scrape.
37. Still feeling dumber than at any other instant. Yet within the dumber, slightly new.
38. A presence burrowed in my sickness. A number of small bumps on my head.
39. Tiny lock and key by my bathroom counter top that I have no clue as to the origin of.
40. Read while shitting in a daze: It's not so much about approaching it from the outside and thinking about how it operates, it's more about being inside the thing and trying to keep up with its demands.
41. And now, between list items 39 and 40, the advent of a new year has come and gone and today is another day.
42. The new year. Maybe if I repeat. The new year.
43. The new year in which my father doesn't recognize his picture.
44. The new year in which I still don't feel asleep when sleeping, really, or awake even now.
45. The new year with streets gummed full and no one yielding. With each breath slightly older, slightly further ruined.
46. The new year in which ducks at risk of attack by predators are able to balance the need for sleep and survival, keeping one half of the brain awake while the other slips into unconscious.
47. The new year in which the internet is still available 24 hours a day.
48. The new year arching up to scratch it back on something bigger.
49. The new year with 356 shopping days till Christmas.
50. The new year with 12 billing cycles until the new year.