On Insomnia and The Creative High by pulpherojm

I can’t sleep. Its three-forty in the morning, I’ve been twenty-four for one week, and I can’t sleep. It isn’t about being twenty-four I know that much. The rain runs down the drainpipe on the other side of the wall in my cheap, shitty studio apartment, creating this repetitive faucet running noise. The kind that makes you get up five times in the night to try the twist the faucet handles on your sink. Gripping them with all the strength you have, as if by wrenching and punishing the faucet enough you can somehow stave off the madness you feel is about to crack your skull open and force it’s way into reality. My fridge starts to put in it’s two cents in after a while. This would be annoying if it didn’t have the added benefit of drowning the faucet–like noise of the drainpipe into submission, if even for a few minutes, just so the tide of madness in my head can keep from boiling over and eventually simmer down. But these things aren’t what is keeping me awake.
The new term started last week, and I was very excited because I had gotten into a digital arts class; which of course was normally closed to everybody but art majors. The class had not filled up though and so the last few seats were opened to the rest of us, a token of bread thrown to the squalling masses of hungry to be fought over while the elite few watch with impassivity. It had been so long since I had done anything creative. Since moving to the city to go to college, I had sort of existed in limbo, detached from the rest of myself. I would sit outside the art department, and see the students working in the studios, or walking to and from classes with big pieces of poster board or canvases or art supplies and I would think to myself soon, soon I will be one of them again. I don’t know why I didn’t draw in my free time. I guess I hadn’t felt inspired. It wasn’t like I knew that to be the reason I didn’t draw or sculpt, it was more like waking up one morning and realizing that you are unhappy because you are uninspired, just like I woke up this morning and realized that I had been twenty-four for a week. I was merely floating, existing. I felt stagnant. Then I signed up for ARTD 252, the digital arts class.
I love tabletop gaming. I know this seems like an unrelated topic, but bear with me. I love tabletop gaming. For those of you who don’t know what that means, I’m sorry, for those of you who do, I am glad I am not alone in the universe. I play video games sometimes, but they don’t really hold interest for me. For me, its sitting in a dank basement or darkened apartment, facing your opponent across the table from you, cards or dice or board pieces strewn about on the table. To the uninitiated it just looks like a mess, but the idea that something more profound than a table covered in goofy looking cards and colorful playing pieces can still be gleaned by those who aren’t “in the know”. To those who spend their free time partaking of these pen and paper glories, there is no mess. The cards and pieces are an extension of yourself, grouped and situated in such a way as to provide certain mathematical and statistical data to you visually. To those who play these games, they have the ability to walk into any hole-in-the-wall game shop, walk up to a table and look at its surface and be able to tell who is winning and who is secretly biding their time to strike when their opponent is most vulnerable. Anybody can hop on a console and blast some guy with a shotgun from halfway around the world, but nothing beats matching wits against an opponent in physical reality. In the bygone days of yore, men would test each other’s skills in battle, striving to be the best. Now, they merely roll for initiative.
This of course goes back to my previous art slump. I had been toying with the idea of a board game in my head for a while. It wasn’t really serious. It was just an idea that I had stored in the back of my head somewhere. It would pop up every once in a while when I wasn’t doing anything important and I would think about it and then go about my day. It was an old piece of homework or post-it note lying amongst all the other crap you have stored in your living space that you uncover one day while cleaning. You look at it and think about it for a little while then maybe put it somewhere else, thinking you get back to it when you are done with what you are doing, and then you promptly forget about it again and it get lost in the shuffling of all your stuff as you clean. After signing up for this art class, I was tooling around on my computer, not really doing anything important. It was another late night bout of insomnia and I was riding it out with the tired patience of an old man dealing with some young street punks who think they know it all. The idea popped back into my head. On a whim, I opened my word processor and started framing the idea out.
It was a rush, a torrent. I was a man drowning in my own ecstatic glee as the words and ideas leapt from my mind and into the computer with every keystroke. My brain swarmed with ideas. I could only sit and slowly pick them out one by one. Six AM found me chain-smoking out my bathroom window, tired and buzzed at the same time. There is no drug that compares to the high you get when you create something. It’s the high that satisfies. I remember bronze casting classes at my local community college. That was a great time. Walking into the studio and seeing all the familiar faces. Talking shop with the other sculptors and metalworkers. Bouncing ideas back and forth, or practicing creative problem solving. Those were the good ol’ days for me, and they had come thundering back out of the past in my darkened apartment, early in the morning. There was this one old lady, I sometimes think she might have been a little of her rocker. She used to weld chunks of metal together in the back room. She once referred to her artwork as “Children of My Mind”. I believe this statement to be true. After giving birth to this idea, I would now watch it grow, nurturing it as best I knew how, hoping it would eventually bear fruit, instead of being lost amongst the rest of the debris.
Know though, that the drug of creativity comes with a price. I am unable to sleep because my “mind child” has come to a halt. I wait impatiently while watching my pirated graphics program slowly download. One thing to remember is to always have the tools you need on hand. I did not, and now I suffer. This creativity high I once had has now mutated into a dark beast. It prowls my mind, and hungers in the pit of my gut. I cannot think of anything else now. I am blinded by this one idea. No longer is it an idea to be lost in the clutter but a bad penny, never to be gotten rid of. I can do nothing but wait.
Now I lay awake in my apartment, the ideas buzzing and droning louder than the drip of the rain gutter. The hunger pulses in time to the standby light on my sleeping computer, ready to awaken and strike again. I long to ride that high again. To be a blacksmith, forging glory out of heat, sweat and the minerals of the earth. Instead, I slowly dip into madness as the soft plink of the faucet taunts me to try my strength against it’s steel.