4:30 am, buds, and you know what that means. Electric fire on the brain. Not just awake but really really awake – but not aware that this is very out of whack. I think I’ll make it all day on less than 5 hours of sleep, every time. I guess not this time. I almost bought some clothes online that I can’t afford atm.

I do the most insane things. I drink coffee almost every time, without sanity. Sometimes somehow pot gets involved, without sanity. Things are bought, etc.

So I’m beginning to have almost daily cycles – up and ecstatic in the early morning, fucked by anxiety and paranoia the rest of the day. The real kind, not the loopy pot kind. There’s a major difference. The real kind has always been here before.

And the shrink says, Why do you think you call it the “real” kind, making those quotation marks with his voice and eyebrows rising.

So I’m learning After Effects instead of sleeping or spending. Seems a relatively manicky thing to do, but safe. Nobody gets hurt except for design and aesthetics – I mess them up pretty regularly.

It’s the other kind – not the one where you can’t fall asleep, but the deal where you wake too early. I started out slowly: wake up just before the alarm, day after day, then a half-hour, then an hour before the alarm. Then I just stopped with alarms altogether. And all my life I’ve been an alarm guy, you could say. A guy who needed prodding to wake up no matter what time of morning. I’d sleep in by three hours, if I could.

The massive rift cut through my life by bipolar disease has separated from that time. Time is something I have plenty of now that I’ve gone earlier and earlier to the point at which my insomnia becomes something transcendent. I’m now waking up at 2am regularly, completely awake, totally all there. I crash in the mid-morning hours of 8-10. I’m going to bed around 10:30 and face-planting, falling immediately to sleep. And then I essentially take a nap. Wake up 4 hours before dawn.

This is why my insomnia is such an ass-kicker, ninja, street fighter. I’m timing the meds to reduce it, but I always have breakthroughs. I can break through clonazepam. When take it and still break through I’m a ghostly mess, drugged out of my mind by the clonazepam and sleeplessness combined with hypomania. I’ll leave the burner on after making tea. I’ll eat way too much. One time I sleepwalked out of the apartment, and woke up to the ding of the elevator.

I don’t know how to end this post, probably because it’s 5:30 and I’m beginning to feel the first effects of the coming crash. Sunrises can either be inspiring or deadly to your outlook. There’s one coming. Let’s hope it’s the former.

It’s a countdown till I next see my pdoc. I see him once every three or four weeks, during which time I download as much as I can in 25 minutes about what’s going on with my meds. Oh yes, he does take my insurance, but he wants more on top of that for a full 50-minute hour. So I have short appointments.

This Wednesday I’m going to bring up ADD. This isn’t quite true, though. He brought it up last time I saw him and complained of lack of focus, never getting anything done, hardly leaving the apartment, etc. So he said something like, “Did you have trouble sitting still and concentrating as a child?” I knew he was beginning the diagnostic part of the session (who wouldn’t know what was going on, with that question?). I hemmed and hawed. I was a focused kid, driven, and concentrated well. It’s just now that I’m feeling the symptoms of ADD, which may explain the countdown feeling I’ve got: he may not diagnose me, and then where will I be? In the “just do it” world of the therapist I fired last Spring. His advice was just … a bit rich. He very nearly said to me once, “baby steps.” I could see the words forming themselves in his head.

I don’t want to go back to that. I want to be evaluated clinically and try medication. I’m always up for medication tests, because who knows what’ll work and plug yet another hole that’s sprung in the dam?