Running on Empty
I have such a terrible concept on short-term time so I'm inclined to say "several weeks ago" but it could very well likely be months. A while back, lets say, I heard this song by one Jackson Browne called The Pretender and I was blown away at how much the lyrics resonated with me. All of them except the part of getting proper sleep. My self-sabotage on sleep is beyond your wildest imagination. It has started to interrupt and effect my performance at work. The combination of not getting proper rest, and not eating at all, only really drinking coffee as a way to stay alive, it is all starting to come back and collect it debts. Thirty years of "fuck it" is starting to prove itself to be unsustainable, as I start my drive down the final stretch of whatever remains of this life, something has to change and it has to change in a hurry. I've gone so long without eating properly that the act of eating is something of an uphill battle. As soon as I try to eat a little bit of this or that, it just doesn't work out the way you would think it would. Simple things like eating. This culminates into a fiery hellscape that is me trying to sleep at night. I'll wake up four hours after laying down covered in sweat and have no idea why. It's like I had been working out while sleeping. But I'll be freezing so much that it forces me out of bed to walk around in circles. Eat a piece of bread, forcefully, and now you're really cold. So now it's easy to get back into bed because that is where it is warm. It's such a vicious cycle. I woke up 7 minutes before I was supposed to be at work today. This has happened three times in the last six weeks after having never happened at all in my life. This is why I can tell that the walls are starting to show signs of decay and weakness. Something is going to give very soon and I don't know what it is. I was barely able to carry my own body weight around at work today, let along the thousands of pounds of meat we had to move from Location A to Location B in the freezing cold. All day at work "GO TO SLEEP EARLY TONIGHT" but then as soon as we get off our mind goes into fucking overdrive and it lasts for 8 to ten hours. I can't turn it off. I wish I could. I am spread too thin. There is too much on my plate. At the same time, there is nothing on my plate. I am just so confused right now and very exhausted. I need a week off of work so I can just sleep the entire time. Then I need another to get back to where I need to be in my life. But everyone feels this way. So just shut the fuck up and keep going.
The point of this bullshit post was, when I was moving a heavy ass box of meat and slammed it down to where it needed to go, out of nowhere, the chorus of Running on Empty came into my head. It's a song I have no real attachment to. Maybe it was on the overhead radios or something at work recently and that's where it came from. After work today I looked up the song on the way home, and to my shock I came to realize it too is by Jackson Browne. I feel like I have a lot of common threads with Jackson Browne and how he views the world.
Now then, back to sabotage.