I beat my alarm this morning. Not in the sense that I physically abused the too-often-glowing brick next to my bed--I almost never sleep late enough to wake up to the alarm. That's the problem.

The problem, really, is me. I feel so primitive sometimes, with hair trigger mind: the simplest stimulus fires me into high gear and there's rarely any turning back once the race has begun. The sorts of thoughts that have no place immediately preceding or following attempts to sleep or fall back asleep, presented as they have presented themselves to me:

"whatamidoingwithmylife
isthiselectionjustafeverdream
whatcanIdotohelppeoplewakeup
howdoImakealivingasacriticaloveranalyst
amIanassholeforthinkingpeopleareasleeporamItheonewhoisasleep
whycantIactuallysleep
whydoesmyhearthurt
whywouldIwantsomeonewhodoesntwantme
doIwantwhat'sbestforme
couldIdobetter
IknowIcould
Why don't I want to?
Why can't I cut myself a break?
Why can't I sleep?"

There's a tattoo of a feather quill on my arm. Not the one I actually use to write with, ironically, but the one with a scar from a lover I once let break me. I've broken a few times, but not in the way that I conceive myself as damaged.

No-like any other muscle, a heart cannot grow unless placed under stress. Fraying, sometimes tearing, sometimes bleeding into every other crevice of my body, sometimes bleeding onto paper as words. But always healing, and always stronger for having torn and rebuilt, with more room and greater capacity to feel and beat. Beat to sustain my own body and life, and with any luck, to brighten and couple with someone else's. Someday.

Writing in this coffee shop on many cold and otherwise lonely mornings has saved me from myself.

I need to be able to sleep well again to continue working where I work, to continue training my body as I train it, to give myself to the world and to my family, to one day give myself to the person I hope will exist one day and want to make a family with me.

I need some semblance of peace to sleep, and writing this feels like it might help. That's where the tattoo came from: a time when I wrote my way out of a cave of heartbreak and self doubt, back into the harsh but invigorating light of the world. Like a caveman, evolving out of my primitive form by inking my experiences onto a digital wall. Let these feverish ramblings be my paintings at Lascaux.

Trying to understand myself--or waking life--from inside a cave would never bring any peace. This morning, I'm little more sophisticated than our early ancestors who were only just learning that they were not always at the mercy of the beasts and magic and life and death they depicted in their paintings. They ventured further and further from the caves with each successive generation; I venture further with each sip, each degree of consciousness granted by caffeinated catharsis.

If I understand nothing else about the way those earliest humans experienced a world that was entirely wild and mysterious, I understand their compulsion to record their experience. Their depictions in two and three dimensions were not always true to life, but they were what those human hands and minds could conceive. I couldn't say if they began to understand themselves or their world better through their paintings and handicraft, as I hope to through my own scribblings.

All I can do is take heart in that humanity has come a long way since Cro Magnon; perhaps I will evolve a bit myself through this exercise. Along with tentative hope, I must admit a bit of apprehension when I look at what humanity has evolved into today. We've demonstrated such potential for enhancing and advancing our species' existence, but just as much potential for self-harm and destruction.

So I will try to wake up slowly, blinking and squinting when I must, letting the light temper my lens each time it passes through. Of course, right now, this light refracts and projects as abstractly as the cave paintings of our ancestors. I can only hope that the exercise of recording and reflecting will one day allow the light through unfiltered, unbent, and pure.

I'll raise a mug and sip to that, as often as I can, each morning I wake up in this coffee shop. You're welcome to join me, at your own hazard and hope.