Good Advice

What nobody tells you about killing somebody is, you’ll never sleep again.

It’s that, by 4 o’ clock in the morning, you’ve exhausted all of your distractions. What’s on TV is pure crap, things that you’ve already seen before or thing that you don’t want to see. Reruns or infomercials, it all boils down to crap you shouldn’t be watching anyway, because everyone decent in your time zone fell asleep a long, long time ago.

And even if we’re just counting the hours, everything feels like a long, long time ago.

The radio is your best bet, some station with a monotone DJ playing slow jazz or classical music. If that doesn’t put you to sleep, you’re screwed. Even better, tune the machine to some non-existent station, no music or talk radio or a preacher talking about eternal damnation for all those who have turned their back to the lord, just pure static.

They don’t make noise like that anymore.

Still, sometimes the static will drive you nuts. Every once in a while, some station will bleed through, and through pure white noise, you’ll hear someone talking about politics. You’ll hear a piano tinkling in the background of nothingness, and you can’t be sure if you actually heard it, or if it was a figment of your imagination. Something your brain made up.

And you start questioning whether this is real life or not. And maybe the static you’re hearing, maybe that’s just the sound of someone turning off their TV for the night. Maybe it’s the sound that God makes when you bore him and he changes the channel. Or the sound of God getting sleepy, turning off the boobtube and going to bed.

The sound it makes when nothing is watching you anymore. The sound it makes when you’re really, truly, all alone.

Either way, if you have insomnia for the same reason I do, all the white noise, all the empty sounds in the world aren’t gunna help you.

Abandon all hope, ye who just try to get some sleep.

If you listen to people, your friends or your family or your doctor, then you’d have already tried all of those homegrown remedies for insomnia. All those people who think they’re actually helping, there are the people who will tell you to count sheep. They’ll say, don’t drink coffee after noon. Take a warm bath with Epsom salts and baking soda. Drink a warm glass of milk.

Thanks, guys.

After none of that shit works, there’s always drinking yourself to sleep, which works well if you don’t mind waking up in a pool of your own vomit every morning. Besides, alcohol just doesn’t work like it used to, doesn’t have the power to shut off the brain anymore. No matter how drunk, my drunk thoughts are never that different from my sober ones.

It’s those kinda thoughts that won’t let me sleep at night. Those kinda thoughts that won’t let me think. The thoughts that won’t let me turn off. That aren’t letting me live.

These people, full of useful things to say, they’ll suggest getting high, smoking weed. And trust me, I would recommend it, but not if your brain refuses to shut the fuck up. Getting high and sleeping aren’t mutually inclusive.

They’ll suggest drinking cough syrup, a lot of it. Friends, they’ll tell you stories about high school, where they had a bad cough, so they drained a bottle of Robitussin before going to bed. When they woke up at 4 in the morning to take a piss, they looked around the room and noticed that the walls were breathing, flanging in and out. When they tried to stand up, they noticed their legs were made out rubber bands and their bones were made out of jelly. When they went to the bathroom, they had to hug the wall like a ninja, inching sideways to keep from falling on their faces.

If that doesn’t put you to sleep, they’ll say, than nothing will.

No kidding.

You have to get the right brand of cough syrup though, the type that’s pure DXM, the stuff that will fuck you up. Any other ingredients like acetaminophen will wreck your liver and you might shit blood. Granted, more than likely, you’ll end up in a hospital bed, where they’ll pump you full of drugs that might actually put you to sleep.

Maybe you’ll get a good night’s sleep that way.

Otherwise, here we are. Following useless advice. Information that people got from watching TV, from listening to their friends, listening to their grandparents. Listening to friends of friends of friends, a long chain of advice that was started by some anonymous no one. No one ever just bothers to tell you what they’re actually thinking. No, instead, you have to listen to shit that they read in a magazine or saw in a movie.

Most of the time, it feels less like you’re talking to a person, more like you’re talking to characters on a daytime soap opera. The eerie way that life reflects, and not the other way around.

That’s the way living feels. How life is either a melodramatic soap opera or a shitty comedy-of-errors, it all depends on how you look at it.

The difference between comedy and drama is you’re supposed to laugh at one and cry at the other. Really, the only difference is your own personal sense of humor.

The deciding factor is you.

What you should do when people are giving you advice like this is laugh. What you should do is ask what they really think, because if you explain what your life is to most people, what your life really is, they’re going to tell you that you’re totally fucked.

All the cough syrup in the world won’t fix this. All the booze that you can through down your throat won’t help you now.

Even if you manage to fall asleep, there’s always tomorrow to worry about.

Seriously, it’s best if you laugh this all off. Just imagine life as being one long, drawn out joke that God is telling its buddies around the water cooler at work.

It hurts way less that way. Somehow, your life being a shitty joke just seems to make the most sense.

Otherwise, here we are. Following useless advice. And there’s just so much of it to follow. Everyone has so many useful things to tell you about how you should live your life, up until the point that you need them to actually say something useful for a change.

They’ll say:

Go to school.

Get a degree.

Don’t get drunk, but drink enough to be social.

Fold your clothes.

Hold your fork tines down.

Don’t slurp your soup.

Drive 5 miles above the speed limit, unless you see a cop.

Keep your lawn mown.

Find a job that you don’t hate, so long as it pays well.

Then it’s:

Find a girlfriend.

Be happy, or at least pretend.

Live with your girlfriend for a while.

Buy a house. Buy a car. Get a dog.

Ask your girlfriend to marry you.

What a doozie. Having to remember to do all that shit, it’s a surprise you have enough time in the day to remember what your name is.

By the way, if you ask them why you should be doing all of this, why you shouldn’t just hitchhike around the country or live in the jungle, the most honest answer you’re gunna get is that they saw all this crap on TV.

It worked for the actors, why shouldn’t it work for you?

Under no circumstances should you follow advice that people will give you on how you should propose to your girlfriend. Just a regular proposal over a fancy dinner isn’t enough, they’ll tell you.

It’s just so cliché.

Like they’re so original. As if everything they say hasn’t already been said to a billion other people before you. As if every word out of their mouth isn’t already a cliché.

Just keep laughing. You’ll be the one guy in the soap opera that no one quite understands. The one psycho in the room who keeps staring directly into the camera.

No, they’ll tell you. Don’t be boring. No, a proposal has to be memorable. If it’s just your run-of-the-mill popping of the question, that’s setting a precedent for your marriage.

No one wants a boring husband.

So, they’ll tell you, make it special. Make it something that will last forever. Make it something that will never, ever be forgotten, no matter how drunk you get, how high you get. No matter how much cough syrup you drink. Make it something that will stay inside your brain, even when you just want to sleep.

Put the engagement ring inside of a class of champagne. Seriously, to these people, these personalities you see on TV, that’s the difference between boring and exciting. This is something that is absolutely original. The anti-cliché. Something that has never happened to anyone before.

Thanks again for the advice.

The thing is, after a bottle of wine over a fancy dinner, you’ll both be a little bit drunk. Everyone is happy and smiling, and here comes the waiter with two glasses of fizzily champagne.

Everybody is having such a wonderful night, there’s no way anything could go wrong. And while you’re confessing your love, while You’re about to pop the question, she takes a big gulp out of her glass, then looks at you with this pained expression.

That treasured, timeless moment that will last forever. Of course she’s gunna choke up.

Tears in her eyes, you say how it’s ok, how you love her, how you want to spend her entire life with her.

The issue is, that pained look, it’s from the stone on the engagement ring tearing up the soft flesh in her throat. Her esophagus constricts, and the ring gets stuck there.

How your brain didn’t put two and two together, who knows. Maybe you’re just drunk. Maybe you weren’t thinking.

Maybe you’re just an idiot.

You have to figure, thousands of people must choke in restaurants every year. Someone swallows too much steak, or has some sort of a random allergic reaction, it’s all hardly newsworthy. This isn’t bombs in a train station or a new strain of flu. It’s not terrorism and it’s not tsunamis. It has nothing on volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, West Nile virus, AIDS, earthquakes, plane crashes, forest fires, nothing compared to hurricanes and wars and flesh-eating bacteria and a hole in the ozone layer.

But let’s not compare disasters.

All that’s advice you follow, no one ever gave you advice about this. Hell, you don’t even know how to do the Heimlich Maneuver. That’s why, when her face turns blue, when she slumps over, face-down in her crème-brulé, when you rush behind her and try to squeeze the ring out of her throat, you crush her ribs. She starts bleeding everywhere, except you can’t see it.

In your mind, you think you’re helping. Too bad, you’re making things a hell of a lot worse.

You can mow your lawn every day, don’t smoke, be a good person, but all the old advice in the world isn’t gunna help anything now.

It’s not until your table is coated in blood that she keeps coughing up, it’s not until then that you actually start to connect the dots.

Maybe the worst part is, after they do an autopsy, after they cut open the love of your life, after they tell you that the broken ribs she suffered sliced into her lungs, that she didn’t die from choking but by drowning in her own blood, the worst part is where they ask if you want the ring back.

As if there’s a good answer to that question.

This is what she must have felt like when I asked her. That choked-up feeling.

What you have to keep reminding yourself is, just laugh. This stupid comedy-of-errors. Just fuck-up followed by fuck-up followed by fuck-up, that’s what your life boils down to.

And it’s that, by 5 in the morning, your throat burns from inhaling cigarettes all night, but it must be nothing compared to having an engagement ring stuck in your windpipe.

Laugh it up.

The sun’s not up yet, but the birds are twittering away, trying to find food. Trying to find a reason to live, like everything else.

Maybe you could call someone, ask them what you should do today, but it’ll just be more of the same.

Make sure to brush your teeth.

Shower.

Eat a good breakfast.

Truth is, no one really cares. Truth is, you’re free to do whatever.

And, if you want to follow some shitty advice, there here:

Just keep laughing.