Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
There is a technique making the rounds called cognitive shuffling, and I want you to know I tried it with the sincere desperation of a man who has not slept properly since the second Clinton administration and has exhausted every alternative including melatonin, white noise machines, three different podcasts about unsolved murders, and lying very still while mentally arguing with people who will never know I won.
The premise: pick a long, emotionally neutral word, and for each letter visualize random unconnected things until your brain mistakes this gentle idiocy for the natural slide into sleep and simply stops. Stops the reel. Stops the highlight package of every spectacular failure presented nightly in your skull like a film festival no one asked for, with no concessions and no exit.
Luc Beaudoin invented it. He was a college student who couldn’t sleep. He became a scientist specifically about sleep. I respect this in the way I respect anyone who got mugged and then got a black belt instead of just being afraid of parking garages forever.
I told Karie at 10:47pm. She has a PhD and the resting heart rate of a stone. She said “okay” and selected her word and was clinically dead to the world in eleven minutes. I know this because I checked. I put my face very close to hers in the dark to confirm she was breathing and not simply performing sleep to make a point, which honestly would also be impressive.
I was still up at 1:30.
The Word Must Be Emotionally Neutral, Which Is Hilarious
The experts are firm: no charged words. Nothing dragging grief or money or that one Thanksgiving. Five to twelve letters, blank as a fresh incident report.
I chose KUMQUAT.
Small citrus. Inoffensive. I have no kumquat history. No kumquat debt. No unresolved kumquat situation from 1994 that I have never discussed with anyone including my therapist, who I no longer have, which is itself a data point I’m not examining tonight.
K.
K is for kite.
K is for Keswick, Virginia, where I live on a farm with a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has been engaged in a sustained psychological campaign against me for three months, and I do not know what I did, and I do not think she’s going to tell me. This week, she stood in the rain for forty minutes staring at a spot six inches to the left of my head. Not at me. Near me. The way a person stares near you when they want you to know they’ve thought of something worse than looking at you. I have begun checking my blind spots.
U.
U is for umbrella. Universe.
U is for the urologist appointment I have been rescheduling since October because I have decided that as long as I don’t go, the information doesn’t exist, which is not how information works but is absolutely how I’m choosing to operate at sixty, which is the age I am now, which arrived like a bill from a collection agency for a debt I didn’t remember accruing.
M.
M is for mango. Moon. Mellow.
M is for the medical intake form I filled out last month where they ask about your drinking in the careful, neutral language of a form that is judging you while maintaining plausible deniability. The options were: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Daily. I hovered over Sometimes for a long time. Sometimes is a coward’s answer. Sometimes is the answer of a man who believes the form has context when the form does not have context. The form is just a form, and the doctor is going to read “Sometimes” and know exactly what it means, and what it means is “daily but not heroically.”
Q.
Q is for quiet.
Q is for Queso, eleven pounds of chihuahua, currently attempting to physically enter my body through the mattress via my left hip. He is on a diet because the vet used the word “obese” with the flat affect of someone who has said it a thousand times and decided not to dress it up anymore. Queso received this information and responded by becoming a different, angrier animal who sleeps touching as much of me as possible as a form of invoice. He doesn’t want affection. He wants me to know that this is my fault and that he is tracking it.
A Is Where I Lost the Thread Entirely
A.
A is for apple. Anchor. Aisle.
A is for the autobiography draft on my desktop, inside a folder inside a folder inside a folder the way you hide things from yourself while technically keeping them. Looming is the chapter I cannot finish. The one where I have to be honest about a specific Tuesday, and I keep writing around it like a man mowing a lawn around a hole, getting closer, doing tight little circles, the grass very neat, the hole still there. Sixty years old and still mowing around the Tuesday. Tuesday does not care. The Tuesday has been there since 1994 and it is not in any hurry.
A is also, apparently, for Baconator, which starts with B, and if you are keeping score at home that means the technique has already failed, I have lost the letter, I have lost the thread, I have lost everything Luc Beaudoin worked for, and I’m not even to T yet.
The Baconator is what I call the invisible fence collar Trouble wears. I named it. I thought it was funny. I still think it’s funny. I am also lying in the dark genuinely uncertain whether it stopped a pig tonight or whether the pig has, through sustained contempt and force of will, simply decided the Baconator is a suggestion. She has been in a mood. A pig in a mood who also suspects the Baconator is having connectivity issues is a pig who is running numbers right now in the dark, and I can feel it from here, and there is nothing I can do about it from this bed, and I am not getting up.
I’m definitely getting up.
T. God Help Me, T.
T.
T is for tree. Twilight. Tender.
T is for the open mic in 2019 where I did the bit about Remmi, my blind dog, and I thought it was working, I could feel it working, and then I hit the button — the button I’d been building to for four minutes — and the room gave me that specific silence, that velvet nothing, that noise a joke makes when it was funny to the person who wrote it and only to that person. I stood there at the microphone in the dark and the silence and understood in my body that this was just a thing that happened to me now and would continue to happen and I could either leave or stay and I stayed and I finished the set and I drove home and I did not talk about it for six months and I am talking about it now at 1:30am to a kumquat.
T is also for sixty, which doesn’t start with T. I know that. But sixty is where I live now and it follows me into every letter. Sixty is the age where the urologist appointment means something different than it did at forty. Where the intake form check boxes are less rhetorical. Where the Tuesday in 1994 is no longer something that happened to a young person but something that happened to you, and you’re still you, and the math on that does not improve with examination.
The Sleep Foundation says seventy million Americans have sleep disorders. I’d like to have a word with the other seventy million. Specifically I want to know how many of them made it all the way through their word without the letters fighting back. Without Q becoming Queso becoming the vet’s face when he said “obese.” Without M becoming the check boxes. Without A becoming a folder inside a folder inside a pig in the dark wearing a collar I named after a Wendy’s sandwich. Without T becoming the microphone and the silence and the drive home and the not talking about it.
Tomorrow night I’m using BLUNDERBUSS.
Eleven letters. No obvious history.
But B is for birthday.
And I just turned sixty.
And it’s 2am.
And Trouble is out there making decisions.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- KUMQUAT: A Sleep Study - May 8, 2026
- They Named Everything Firefly - May 7, 2026
- Marrakech v. America - May 5, 2026
