A Pattern is Forming

These sleepless nights are starting to get to me. Nothing seems to really be working: booze, pills, reading, meditation, directed relaxation, coding, writing, nothing.

I just lie awake at night, alone in a darkened room prepared exactly as I have always prepared it. Tired. Yawning sometimes, but no longer able to get the myriad thoughts I have off my mind.

I have books I want to finish, software I want to write, and tasks I want to do. None of these things should be happening at 3 AM, but good luck telling my brain that. I toss and turn, then get up and find something to distract myself. Tonight it was reading parts of CPAN.org and checking my seldom-used Gmail account. I wouldn't know if I've gotten any mail older than a week or so ago, but no matter: nothing really uses it besides automated notification lists and I don't pay attention to them, either.

Going to bed early helps a little, but the effects are the same. I had hit a really reliable stretch of good nights' sleep, and I don't know how or why I a) first gained or b) then lost the magic.

Update: A lost night's sleep is totally worth it when exchanged for learning the value of including "$::RD_TRACE = 80;" in your Perl scripts when trying to build a grammar for consumption by Parse::RecDescent.