All around me are my friends. Small bits of them like a fine coat of ash on the back of my monitor, up on the mantle, on my stationary left hand. It’s comforting in a way, knowing they’re here. Tiny bread crumbs, calling cards, and, when I stir the air, communion. The woman who lived here before me owned a lizard, and though the lizard has not been here in reptile for many years now, I do still find flecks of it, which warms the heart (albeit only to room temperature, naturally). So, until entropy has its way, we are all alone together.

I know people who can trip into a bed of gravel and fall asleep as they land, and believe me, I admire them that. For me sleep is a self-conscious act that comes only after deliberate negotiations, akin to picking a lock. Only success means that I never quite remember how I achieved it.

Not to sound too mysterious–most of the challenge is simply one of positioning. A perfect example is the sudden and bothersome awareness of my ear, which is never as unmanageable as it is when it’s folded wrong between my head and the pillow. I’ve tried–truly tried–to let things fall where they may, but the diabolical knowledge that I may be sleeping on a folded ear is enough to pull me from the very edge of sleep. The fingers of my free arm probe between head and pillow like night spelunkers, sweeping the ear back into a flat position, careful not to tug too tightly, for the ear must be in a neutral resting position.

It’s not to say that I’m obsessive about it. Generally I’m fine once I’ve established a normalized ear flap position.

A far more difficult challenge in my life has centered around the position of my jaw. As a child I would often lose up to an hour of sleep while I sought the precise position that would keep my mouth from snapping open wider than that of a plankton-sifting basking shark. The most frustrating aspect of this phenomenon was that it only bothered me when I became aware of it, and that was usually when I was having trouble sleeping. I knew that at some point I would have to become completely relaxed, but whenever I relaxed my jaw my mouth would open. So I relaxed my entire body except for my jaw, which I consciously kept shut under the barest trickle of power. But of course then the trouble was that I was aware of the effort required to keep my mouth shut, and after some minutes I could feel my jaw muscles straining, humming like old fluorescent lights. I would never get to sleep like that.

Eventually I resorted to holding my mouth shut with my hands, positioned like a squirrel eating a nut. And it actually worked a couple of times. Unfortunately, holding my arms in that position also caused them both to fall asleep, and I would inevitably wake up in the middle of the night flopping about like a tranquilized sea lion to regain sensation in my upper body.

Of course by now I have the benefit of several decades of experience, and finding the right position takes only a few minutes of procedural sheet folding, pillow primping, and limb positioning. After that it’s just a small matter of distracting myself with rudimentary fictional scenarios long enough so that I forget to ask myself whether I’m asleep yet. And mind games like these are by far the easiest to get right.

I have no idea if anyone else has had to go through these kinds of gymnastics just to ford their way beyond the veil of sleep, because it’s not usually something that comes up. “Man am I dragging today. Has anyone else become suddenly aware of how your knee joints press into each other when you keep your legs parallel? Just the thought of the skin compressed between my knees kept me up till dawn.” No, this is something best kept a secret from the entire world, and I’d just as soon not have it floating around in my mind either.

At night I hear them coughing through the ventilation ducts. In Vegas the night–or at least the early morning–is for recuperating. The days they’ve spent borrowing against their savings to play their futile games of chance, but they’ve also been borrowing against their lungs to sit in the smoke pits long enough to finish the job. An air-breather, I am an outsider here–even in Vegas, such a cliche that it’s a cliche to write about it being so.

But I can’t help but note that the people here truly struggle. Spending their paychecks is the easy part. Here they struggle to breathe, taking care to cough through their noses so that they can take a deep drag on the butt hanging from their lip on the next inhale. They struggle to walk on betrayed joints of shattered glass, working their arms like they’re conducting an invisible shell game just to keep their balance.

This struggle goes on all around me, truly defiant to that pull of chaos, as these phantom limbs itch into the night. The transaction is savings into coffers, and the only middleman is time. Nothing else is truly gained or lost, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. They pay for the privilege of time spent, and will pay until there’s nothing left. But in this is also something pure and primal. And there is vulgarity in such debasement. Nothing personal, your money for your time, it says. They’re curling back into fetal balls, tiny cocoons twitching on their twigs.

I can only see it right now because I’m an outsider right now. But how easy would it be to just forget?

It’s much easier to account for the time I spend waiting for the light to change now that they’ve retrofitted a countdown timer to the crosswalk post. Keeping in synch with the beat of the universe is one of the ways that we evade the clutches of chaos–just as we do when we methodically label all the freezer meat, or when we listen to the only slightly irregular tone of our heart monitor in the ICU. These timers are so useful that I’m surprised that they haven’t shown up in more places. There’s certainly opportunity.

Imagine a register that displayed the number of mornings remaining that you would continue to enjoy that same brand of cereal. Or any cereal. Or the number of mornings you had at all. A comb monitor would keep a count of how many hairs were left in your head–a few more last November, but then back down again by early January. Knee-graphs would keep a running measure of the thickness of the cartilage between your bones, with an optional secondary display showing the number of steps you had left to step.

How many days left sitting in your cubicle at work? How many times yelled at? What would be the number of times you’d be frightened, or even more revealing, the number of times yet that you would find occasion to smile?

These are the things that call out to be measured, to be counted, to be tracked. Otherwise are we to merely guess how many orgasms, how many more trips, how many breaths, how many days until the best day of your life–or how long since? Not being able to quantify these things seems almost cruel now that they put up the crosswalk timers. And in point of fact, though I find my frustration mounting, I’m afraid that I can’t tell you just how high.

When I woke up early this morning to conduct an impromptu coughing fit I noticed there was already a hint of dawn coming through the windows. What’s this? It was only just after six, and already the unforgiving interrogation lamp that is the sun is leaping above the horizon with the enthusiasm of my grade 9 gymnastics teacher rallying us with “Up and at em!” before our semiannual six hundred mile sprint.

I hated him and I hate the sun. Call it reverse seasonal affective disorder if you must, but it’s hardly a disorder if you think about it. Despite the star-stippled portrayals of outer space in the movies, most of it is actually pitch black. It’s only when you approach a galaxy–but why would you?–that you can see any light.

Light is the exception, so of course I would find it unsettling. In fact sunlight makes me feel like I’ve been scrubbed with steel wool and lowered slowly into a vat of mustard. Summer’s coming, people, that much is clear, and it’s time to tin foil the windows.

I’ve always been susceptible to colds, but this time I’m returning to the broths entirely. It sounds like a Tuvan throat singer in my right ear, especially when I move my head. It would almost be lyrical if not for the sound coming from my own throat, which is most like a basket of wire hangers upended into a wood chipper. So staying home is an imperative. Conduct experiments: see how long it’s possible to sleep on a futon without losing circulation in limbs. Cut own hair in mirror. Avoid blowing nose repeatedly by crafting nostril plugs out of aloe-infused tissue paper. On rolling a proper nostril plug, by me: tear tissue in half, then fold in half, turn, and fold in half again, then roll into nostril-caliber cylinder, rounding the jutting bits with the thumb. Never round with the index finger. The index finger doesn’t know from rounding. Divergence from the one true path will lead to thrombosis or asphyxiation. And always remember to remove nostril plugs before you answer the door.

Oops, bad move. See, the way you know that someone else is already parking in the place that you just noticed is: you see them backing into it. It’s fair to call this behavior universal, and as such it’s hard to imagine how it could have taken you by surprise to such an extent that you would so brutally assassinate my tire when the coast was clear. And I certainly can’t imagine that the act was worth the diarrhea and impotence that you suffered once my voodoo curse on you took hold, let alone the nightmares, the high ringing sound, or the spider eggs that keep hatching from the large pores around your nose. Rest assured that the atrophy to your tongue will abate once you finally stop calling mommy to make the air-vipers go away. Just relax and enjoy the colors while your eyes can still perceive them, because the end of this ride is much darker indeed.

Nothing shatters this perception of free will more quickly than when you notice the razor wire-tipped fences between you and the grass. Why can you not walk on the grass? Seen from afar, the fog enshrouded hills of Berkeley are so moist and inviting, but when you get anywhere near them you come face to face with the fences. They’re everywhere, like cobwebs in your cellar. Are they to keep you out, or the happy cows in? The Central American expats who work on the new gate around the community refer to themselves as guardas. You’ve heard them laugh about it as they build walls around the big houses. Nor iron bars a cage your ass. Hey guardas, a few more bricks to seal the top and you’d make Poe proud.