All-night movies / Unlimited parking

Today: Zito Madu, a journalist and author of The Minotaur at Calle Lanza; and Miles Klee, author of the novel Ivyland and culture writer at Rolling Stone.

Issue No. 165

Insomnia Film Festival
Zito Madu

The Mall Pulls You In
Miles Klee

Insomnia Film Festival

by Zito Madu

When I tell someone that I have insomnia, the usual response is to ask if I’ve tried some obvious remedy, and since I don’t want to be rude with them because they’re only trying to be helpful, I have to say that yes, I have tried sleeping pills. I have tried exercising myself to exhaustion, and no, it’s not because of my phone or noise, and yes, it’s been like this for as long as I can remember, and well, it’s not necessarily chronic, though one time I went four days without sleep and then passed out for almost a full day. It comes in waves and for no real reason, and I have to endure and let it pass on its own and yes, it is exhausting—I can’t sleep but that doesn’t mean that I’m not tired, I’m actually quite tired, physically and mentally, and bouts of insomnia mean I’ll go through life as a near-zombie for however long it lasts. 

It was especially bad in college. My freshman year particularly. The dorms at University of Detroit Mercy were segregated into all-male and all-female floors—odd floors for boys, even for girls. I first lived on the third floor, and then on the fifth with most of my male friends. The girl I was in love with at the time lived on the sixth. 

By then I had stopped fighting the insomnia, since nothing seemed to work. I accepted it and tried to find ways to pass the time until sleep came. At first, when the internet was still full of adventure and blogs, I would be up late at night looking for new music. Then I tried reading in those hours, but at that level of mental exhaustion, deep concentration is impossible. I tried going on walks, but the danger was that I’d be so tired that sometimes my memory would skip forward, I’d have lost 10-15 minutes or even hours. It’s different from the trance that people experience when driving, where you fall into a sort of autopilot mode and then snap out of it some minutes later. This is more like when you’re watching a movie and decide to skip ten minutes ahead, except in this case I’m one of the characters in the movie who finds himself in a whole new scene and looks around wondering how on earth they got here, and what happened.