Insomnia et futilitia! es cafe, cafe, el simplifico!

As I type these words it is a quarter to six in the morning and I haven't been to bed yet. Well, I've been to bed but I didn't sleep. I don't have insomnia, per se, I have futile sleeplessness. It's involuntary sleep deprivation based solely on the fact that I had a nagging feeling I'd forgotten something.

All night.

I tried to go to sleep. I dutifully got under the covers, I turned out the lamp, ad I laid there. Part of the problem is that a woman's work is never done. I spent the day cleaning and washing and feeding and running errands ad I discovered, around 4 am, that there is a routine, a proclivity, a jones that underscores my day: caffeine.

It starts off immediately upon being terrified out of bed by my egregiously explosive alarm clock which employs a frequency that can double as a sonic rust remover for aircraft carriers. It can move planets out of their orbit. I leap out of bed, race downstairs, and start the joe.

The recommended level is one lumpy tabledspoon of ground coffee per 6 oz. of water. I exceed this recommendation by an order of magnitude, using the recommended grounds ground for a crowd on the grounds that touching the ground slows me down, I'd rather bound around---See that? The shameless and blunt repetition and rhyming? Signs of a hallucinatory state.

I drop the kid off at the Church then head over to the dry cleaners which is located next to the Starbucks they built inside our neighborhood Starbucks. A doppio and a quick run through the Sun Times then race back home to take the medicine I take for a wee lil' problemo I developed, medicine that is essentially Doctor prescribed speed, make a new pot of coffee, and get crackin on the rigorous and erudite refutation of the latest swiftoboatian screes against Obama or Hilary stuffed into my email box overnight by rage-crazed GOP black-op clerks--SEE THAT!? That's unfounded paranoia [no it isn't--Agent K], the 'they're out to get us-ism [seriously, we're not--Agent K] symptomatic of a mind unhinged by stress or S L E E P D E P R I V A T I O N.

But tonight I don't think it was the industrial levels of caffeine or the medicine, tonight it was something at the back of my mind, one of those furtive, irritating hmmmms, like 'hmmmm--did I leave the stove on?' or 'hmmmmm--just how DO you load a self-firing bazooka?' or 'hmmmm--I wonder what THIS does?'

I clean, I prep for school, I have an early breakfast of diet yogurt and what looks like dried contact lenses. Anther cup of coffee. . .just brush the masticated contact lens off my t-shirt and--THAT'S IT: LAUNDRY! I left the kid's uniform in the wash.

But I can't find it. It's not in the washer like I thought. I remember at the last second that I was following a load of bleached whites with a load of NOT EVEN ON THE SAME CONTINENT AS BLEACH black business clothes for my Attorney, dove into the washing machine, and heaved them out over the side. I race down the stairs into the basement and land on--and sink into--an ice cold mound of wet clothes.

There's plenty of time to get them washed and dried. But now that I've discovered what it was that keeping me up, I can barely type. I can barely even sk'cj[s[n ]z. ............ ...... ...............

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.