White male privilege

Some people are simply superior and as a result are permitted to suffer from insomnia. 

I'm pretty sure the preponderance of insomniac's are male: I'll confirm on Google.

I'm an insominac, an insufferable insomniac who's made peace with his insominia, looking myself in the eye at 2:40 a.m. or 3:17 a.m. and saying to myself, "it's ok, you're doing the best you can."

Sometime during last night's morning I was reading Deborah Eisenberg's new collection of short stories, Your Duck is My Duck (HarperCollins, 2018). Eisenberg is what they now call in the lit trade, 'a writer of sentences,' which seems to me just another way of saying, 'a good writer,' being pretty sure myself that Chekhov for instance, or Maupassant, were never called writers of sentences, though they certainly were, for so many of Eisenberg's sentences are really good, no, they're very good. For instance the last sentence of her story "Cross Off and Move On", which begins "He took my hand with such sweetness" is stunning, as is this sentence that graces her story "Merge":

Beyond the apartment's walls, in the night sky of his closed eyes, little lights charted the streets and broad avenues, the apartments and clubs of late revelers, the tall towers, where five or six guys he knew, guys only a few years ahead of him, would be toiling, even at this hour, in their big chairs, the vast windows of their offices overlooking the city, overlooking the planet with its mines and wells, its fields and great waterways, as they steered Earth's course by the graphs and instruments of their predessors' devising into the hidden future.

A veteran insomniac learns how to move from the writing of Deborah Eisenberg (incidentally, she's a writer not only of sentences but also of long short stories or short long stories) to something that might actually put him to sleep, a book of non-fiction about the rise of the Far-Right in the United States, which must have in some strange way prepared me for this breakthrough: I finally understand the rise of Donald Trump!

Unprepared for the answer to the question I've been puzzling over for several years now, unable for the life of me to understand the appeal of a man like Trump to people so unlike him, I scribbled some notes in the margins of Democracy in Chains so that I wouldn't forget my Trump breakthrough.

I then prepared myself for sleep, first Googling Insomnia, Men and Women to find that women are far more likely to be insomniacs than men.

Do Men Drink More Beer than Women?, from author's sketchbook, 2018.