insomnia

(muffled rage)

It is 1:10AM, and I cannot sleep.

It is 1:20 AM, and I am staring at the computer screen.
Tonight, I am breaking my personal blog protocol. I am breaking with my near ethical dedication to keeping things light.
I wonder sometimes at this ache in my head and at the other aches at the base of my neck and in the space between my left shoulder blade and spine. There seems some correlation between the fact that this aching happens in the gaps between one thing and another--at the temples, where the skin is stretched over hollows in the skull, etc--and the fact that I feel in-between . . . things, in-between people, homes, self and self.
It's a terrible cliche, I know, to complain of feeling that one is in-between things, that one is neither one thing or another; it's a terrible cliche to complain of being lonely. So many people are lonely, and when so many complain of the same illness, it becomes not so much an illness but a condition and then not so much a condition but a fact of life.
I know this, but still--I don't want these to be facts in my life, this aching and this feeling that I am not one thing or another. Which is yet another cliche, I'm sure. And this writing it all out, on a blog, at nearly 2AM, that too, is a cliche.

To hell with cliches.

I have been thinking, lately, that being a cliche is not as bad as all that. Perhaps to be cliche is to be human, for being a cliche is to feel something or do something that many people feel and do. It means that you might be simliar to someone else. I know, shocking.
No, being a cliche is not so much the problem as a cliched phrase, because cliched speech and writing excuses people from thinking about what their words mean. Using a cliche is escapist, because cliches are allusions, and, in more statements of the obvious, when we use an allusion we never address something directly, only hint at something that everyone supposedly knows. Thus, we are not required to invest in what we hear or say.
When one uses cliched speech, another person instantly "understands" because it alludes to a "general human condition" and then no one thinks any more of it. We sympathize, but "It's fine/We're fine/They're fine," and then we go about our days, supposing all is well because, well, nothing is out of the ordinary. Cliched phrases are word bandaids. And they are to be hated, because they mask us, the cliches, the humans.

So, really, let me revise. To hell with cliched phrases and up with cliches.

Good night.