I am rumpled today. The world is a frightening place and there are few places to hide, which makes my antagonistic relationship with my bed especially depressing. Insomnia. My bed should rightfully be a cocoon instead of a site of periodic personal failure, the failure to become unconscious. Of all varieties of defeat this has to be one of the most upsetting. The defeat of persistent consciousness. I can't stand the word cocoon, the word cocoon disturbs me on some deep level. F wrote a story called "Cocooning" and I wouldn't even read it just because of the title. I don't even like typing the word. Fear of mummification? Some primitive revulsion is at work in my disgust with the word cocoon. Hidden transformations, the exposure of the illusion of stable personal identity? Maybe I watched the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers at an impressionable moment in my adolescence. Adolescence and its monstrous transformations, perhaps that's at the core of my anxiety about cocoons. How ordinary, I sure hope not. I don't want to fall asleep and wake up something else, I have serious problems with my identity but all things considered I'd rather be me than something worse, something with pincers. Did Gregor Samsa have insomnia? I remember he had "uneasy dreams," whatever that means. All dreams are uneasy dreams. For years I've been trying to avoid falling asleep next to mysterious pods and now I can't fall asleep at all.