There's the insomnia where I simply can't fall asleep. This is bad, but it's a kind of bad which doesn't exactly sneak up on me, it's a familiar kind of despair. Then there's the other insomnia, the one where I wake up after a short period and can't get back to sleep. This is a mute scream, a horizontal panic in which my aspirations of nothingness, the kind of ordinary nothingness everyone else achieves with apparent ease, are seemingly fulfilled then cruelly thwarted for no good reason other than the casual masochism of the human mind. This is gratuitous torture, a trick, an outrageous rescindment, if that's in fact a word. I'm too tired to look it up. The first kind of insomnia fills me with hopelessness and the second kind makes me furious. It's just so mean, but of course there's nothing to get angry at except my own brain, nothing to do but add this to my master list of grievances against nature, alphabetical between insects and itchy scalp. I assume consciousness confers some evolutionary advantage or it wouldn't exist, but it should be more trainable and at least know some basic tricks like "lie down" and "play dead." If my mind was a dog it would have frustrated the most expert obedience schools and been dumped on a shelter as an intractable case.