I hate being tired. It sucks. When there’s so many things to do, so many things to write about, exhaustion cuts through every consideration like a hot, but sleepy, knife.

And before someone suggests caffeine, I have to tell them: it doesn’t work. That is, it does work, it does energize me, it just energizes the wrong part of me. The attention-deficit parts. So this is great when I’m on an all-night video game bender, playing Anno 1800 or some other city builder with my friend Zero.

But it’s terrible when I need to focus and write.

“Write sober, edit high,” to paraphrase George Carlin in an interview with Jon Stewart. It’s one of my favorite bits of his.

“Somewhere, some corner, I keep half a joint hidden. And the day after I’m done writing, I find a lighter, take a puff—it doesn’t take much these days—and it’s pin-up time,” he tells Stewart, to his and the audience’s collective laughter.

I can’t do either, anymore. Once again, I activate the attention-deficit and then run myself ragged with random interests.

Nope, the only cure to exhaustion is good sleep. It’s so simple. And it’s the basis for all this work I’ve been putting into my routine. But it’s been a while since I slept a solid eight hours.

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I did it last night and I know why. There’s no mystery to solve, no riddle to unravel. I finally turned off the TV.

To be clear, I don’t like sleeping with the TV on, but I do like falling asleep to podcasts, and the TV is the easiest way to find the right history podcast with the right amount kind of tone. I should use my phone and portable speaker for it, but the portable speaker has a bass like a boombox. Bass is not great for sleeping unless it’s some binaural ambient playlist. Otherwise it will always sound like a rave is going on in the garage.

I don’t even have a garage.

So I did something weird, something I so rarely do. I turned it all off. And I slept well, or so I thought. Then, as I wrote the first draft of this post, I yawned. Oh god, I was still tired. I still needed a nap. So I did it. I took the nap. It was intended to be thirty minutes, but it turns out, I needed another two hours.

And perhaps I should feel guilty. Perhaps I should be mad at myself.

“Dude, I fucked up my routine and it’s not even Monday.”

But that’s not it. I don’t think anyone should ever be guilty of needing a nap. That’s why the siesta exists, and it’s glorious. The words are easier than ever to write. I’ll probably take a run after I’m done. I’ll apply to some more jobs and then start writing again.

That’s because this routine isn’t about set times. It’s about benchmark activities: write here, run there, apply somewhere. Take a nap in between it all. Eat when hungry, not when bored. Tweak as needed.

Ah, I just crossed the 500 word limit. I’ve been doing that a bit lately. Maybe I need to tweak that. Or maybe every word I write is a gift, a blessing that I’m still here, still doing this. In between sleep, that is.

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