Get some fucking sleep
Dear everyone:
Get some fucking sleep.
What’s wrong with you people? You can’t be Jesus Christ Almighty if you don’t get enough fucking sleep.
I’m 40 now and I don’t want this to sound like one of those muffly ‘things I wish I knew when I was your age’ posts, but Christ: get some fucking sleep.
Look, if you’re out drinking fizzy happy juice and clambering into bed when it’s already tomorrow, you’re not going to be able to sleep properly. Even if you’re sufficiently younger than me that your bladder can still hold a large amount of liquid in it without you needing to go to toilet throughout the night on the strike of the clock, you’re going to sleep like a caffienated rabbit.
The binges are the worst, yeah. The odd pint on a school night, the cheeky half after work, which becomes two and four and perhaps even five. And beer’s stronger these days isn’t it, and pubs aren’t as comfortable, and the sadness is so much more yawning, so you have to drink faster. There you are, whoomph: several litres of beer polished off, and titter oops it’s work in the morning. At my age those things wipe me out for a good few days. I’ll kip terribly, and though the immediate compulsion to vomit heavily into a bag will pass with the day it will get replaced with a terrible dead-brained exhaustion. One night’s sleep won’t do it, any more than one poo is enough when you’ve been bunged up for 48 hours.
But even just a pint here or there. Anything at all. I feel it. So do you. Shut up, yes you do. You’ll be less sharp. You’ll yawn. You’ll be more irritable. And that kind of thing mounts up. A pint every other day chips away at your will to live. Until you’re a grotty, corner-cutting, kitten-kicking toerag. Which will put you in a bad mood with yourself. Which will make you kick kittens even harder.
I can’t do it any more and the reason I know this is that when I don’t do it — when I do as I’ve done now, and gone 15 days with barely a drink at all — I feel like the person that I’ve supposed to have been all this time. I’m awake, and creative, and calm and confident, and my mental health is not a cuticle-shredding clusterfuck.
I need all my wits and verve about me to stave off the awfulness of the near inevitability of global socioenvironmental collapse and actually feel like I’m compos enough to do something proactive and useful about it. The last thing I need, when worrying about what’s going to happen first — fascistic climate wars, or the annihilation of the underlying ecology of the entire planet — is to be sitting around feeling myself to be an insular husk of a person incapable of doing anything other than tutting at people making loud noises and desperately longing for the still, slow release of death.
And so do you. We need you, you silly fucks. You aren’t going to get anything useful done at all if every day is spent playing ‘Hungry or Sick’ . Your brain is not some kind of spongy brick, uncontaminable by the drip-drip of alcohol poisoning or a lack of properly shutting down and processing stuff. You will go fucking mental, or perhaps your barely-contained fucking-mentalness — we are all just about keeping a lid on it, if at all — will spill out of the sides formlessly and splat like a dead bird onto the tarmac.
Get some fucking sleep.
You don’t have to pack in booze. Just remember that every sip of it means you’re making yourself less useful to the world. And that’s fine mostly, because sometimes the world can go fuck itself. You need your chums and your booze and I’m not about to tell you not to have those things. But if you keeping your shit together fundamentally depends on you not feeling strung out and like you are carrying around a bag full of urine-soaked cloth in your head, then do yourself a favour: keep your shit together, and get some fucking sleep.
