The other kind of insomnia

There are two kinds of insomnia. The first is where you go to bed and simply can't fall asleep. Vladimir Nabokov suffered from this variety, as did many of his characters. The thought of going to bed became filled with dread, he wrote, because you knew you wouldn't be able to fall asleep. There's a certain poetry to this version of the affliction, where you're so afraid of not falling asleep that you don't even try. There's also a simple cure: take the appropriate pill, and you're out like the proverbial therapist in August.

The second kind of insomnia is where you wake up in the middle of the night. This is my brand. Sometimes this happens when you're stressed out, and your mind is burning with some particular aggro that you were unable to work out during the day. While this is not pleasant, at least it is explainable. What's worse is when you are hit by this wakefulness and burning brainload for no particular reason. You're under no stress whatsoever, and you endlessly toss and turn while the agents of your brain are digging holes in the area designated as Karl Marx, trying to uncover connections to relativism.

That's how I spent about an hour and a half last night. At about 3:00 I got up and read about gentrification in Loisaida (the Lower East Side) in this architecture anthology I'm in the middle of. Pip liked that idea, and kept butting me in the chin with his head. I fell asleep in about five minutes. So did Pip.

Which, of course, left the issue of Marx unresolved.

The thing is, if you're going to list the most influential people of the 19th Century, I guess the Chuckster is roughly number one. I mean, as far as the category of Thought goes, all these bozos like Nietzsche and Kirkegaard and Freud had their effect, in Freud's case a fairly big one on a popular scale, although he did go way into the 20th Century and I will cover him when the time comes, the bloody fraud, but no one managed to change the geopolitical map of the world like Karly. But no matter how I try, I can only draw the most egregious connections between communism and, say, existentialism (aside from remarking that most of your average existentialists on the street are probably a bunch of pinkos). I do like the subject of communism, though, and the dialectic of communism versus capitalism. It just doesn't fit here. But it bears scrutiny. Every vintage of debate year has a conservative or so planning to cast their first real-live voting privilege in the direction of the biggest Republican they can find, but the great majority are lefties as only young people can be. And obviously the connection of the liberal to the communist is intrinsic, but I wonder how much thought they actually give to it.

A few years ago the NFL Finals topic was a straightforward communism pro or con. I would have so loved that one to prep on.