Can't

Can't sleep again - this happens every year when I get home from Christmas in California - for the seventh consecutive year - head feeling porous, wet, and slack - watermelon of the mind - etcetera etcetera -

I'm debating whether the appropriate thing to do now would be to gratify AO by writing some self-deprecating stories from my trip to Reno/Vegas - though there are none, only sweet stories about buying wheat beer for my dad and holding my mom's hand during the car ride home - or write some of what's on my mind - but as I've previously mentioned, discretion and a butcher block stuck full of serrated knives make public privacy always impracticable.

So instead I find myself trawling past journals, at least the electronic diaries I've kept in Microsoft Word format since getting my first laptop in August 2000, for the most abject bits, key gems including "4/1/01. a possible bio: mandy suffers from an acute sense of geographic dislocation and spends a considerable amount of her time finding anagrams for the word 'diffidence'" and "4/16/01. still emptyhanded in half-hearted search for beauty." I'm not sure why I thought I would find My Documents/Words/Aug-2000-Sept-2001.doc useful, but it has given me nothing but a deprivation migraine and a sense that my writing hasn't evolved from the mediocrity it always has been/will be. Faahhhk.

Okay, so late night is turning me even more ungrateful and uglier than I'd otherwise appear. Thinking of nice things to say - my mother telling me she accidentally kicked brioches that had fallen to the floor of the Monte Carlo buffet galley ("I don't know where they came from")? Dad telling me, on separate occasions, "Black people really have their own special talents" (this because we watched the Prince tribute band "Purple Reign" in a casino bar, but my Chinese was insufficient to tell him that the person personifying Prince was actually white, not black) and "All the Jewish people I've met have been very smart" (this because he met one of my friends (who happens to have descended from the people who killed Jesus) and was pleased as punch to note that she was prudent enough to wear the same arch-supporting soft-soled sneakers - black Saucony Jazzes - as him)? Choking on the piped-in smoke that obscured my front-row view of the jogging topless dancers during the can-can number at the Tropicana Hotel's R-rated "Les Folies Bergere" Topless Revue, which I attended with my family? My dad's awesome metaphor during the four-hour debate: "If I present you with an apple, an orange, a banana, and a potato, and you say, 'The banana's rotten!', that's not fair!"?

Spirits lifting. Urge to kill falling...fallling...falling...RISING!...falling...falling - gone. Let us all bask in insomnia's warm glowing warming glow.