juice.

I eventually fell asleep after that last post, and ended up conking out until about 1pm today. Just a few days ago I had finally been sleeping at a decent hour (1-2am rather than 4-5am) and waking up pretty early, too. Those couple of days in a row like that felt good. I am a night owl and have always been a night owl, but I can't lie when I say I feel better, more energetic, and much more productive when I'm up earlier. My mood seems better, too. So this makes me think about how to change my schedule for good so that these 5am+ bedtimes can cease and desist already.

It reminded me of when I was up all night all the time as a teenager growing up smack dab in Hollywood, CA. When I was 16 years old I worked at a goth club there called "Helter Skelter." (It still exists, btw, and still run by the same people which is so awesome.) I had always been up ridiculously late anyway, assisted by listening to KXLU all night and becoming friends with the graveyard shift DJs when I was 14-15, so when I started working at a night club being out until 3am wasn't a big deal at all. (Now is a good time to explain that I dropped out of school in 9th grade so my sleep schedule didn't matter much at the time.)

Then out of the blue I landed a Levi's commercial, and I had all this money so I quit working at Helter Skelter (and moved out on my own, too, but that's a tale for another day). But my terrible nighttime schedule persisted. The San Francisco earthquake happened right around that time, too, which caused me so much anxiety I couldn't sleep for days, weeks even. What I'm getting at here is I have a long history of being up all night, and while I have gone many years here and there where I could sleep at a semi-normal time (never before midnight, ever), it seems pretty ingrained in my DNA to be up at night instead of during the day.

I am bringing all of this up because as I sit here today trying to think of how I can coax myself into a better sleep schedule, I remembered one time when I was a teenager, post the goth club and after the commercial, that I decided to try to get on a better schedule. I would stay up one hour later every day all the way around the clock until finally I settled on a decent time to be sleeping. That of course made my schedule even wonkier than ever for a while, but as I was doing this I got into this ritual of walking down to the 7-11 a few blocks away from my house to buy a 1/2 gallon of fresh squeezed orange juice. I drank that whole thing of juice every day, so the next day I would go back and buy another one. I don't know why, it was just my thing there for a month or so. Since my schedule was changing sometimes I was walking there when the sun just came up, and other times much later in the day, but no matter what I walked those few blocks down Sunset Blvd. to 7-11 to get my juice every single day. Here's a map of the route:

It's just funny to me how I can remember things like that, but other large swaths of my life are a complete blur. Getting orange juice at 7-11 when I was 16 sticks in my head, though. Someday when I'm riddled with dementia and have forgotten my own name, I will probably still remember walking to get that damn juice at 5 o'clock in the morning.

I don't know how I will break my current bad sleeping habits, though. Sleep is so elusive to me that I cling to every minute of it that I can get my grubby hands on no matter when it takes place. I am not wont to sacrifice any sleep in order to change my schedule around the way that I did when I was a teenager. But I need to do something to make it better. I need to find a way to relax at night. To shut my brain off somehow. I have no clue how I can accomplish this, but I sure would like to try. Unfortunately, I don't think that fresh-squeezed orange juice is going to cut it this time...