Columbo’s Glass Eye

“I have a problem.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do. This time go chronologically, alphabetically gives me indigestion,” replied Andy in one even unimpressed breath over her Cantonese Chow Mein.

“I’m serious – well more than usual, this could be medical, or worst: psychological!” I wheezed my last words. More because I thought that it could be plausible rather than the fact that I was distracted by the last dumpling I had bit into and was presently choking on. It seems it did not want to take the path of previous soldiers before him: ultimately turn into poo. Rather, it wanted to join his presently uneaten family, or maybe it hoped to escape and live its remaining days in the place where he was born (in the back of this tiny, sketchy restaurant in the lost alleys of Chinatown where the waiters are rude and don’t speak English.

It’s snowing now, on this graying February afternoon, and I’m sitting across my longest friend Andy, as I clutch the table attempting to gracefully get through a slight coughing fit. She knows all and too much about me. If I wasn’t sure she’d keep my paranoid babbling to herself, I’d have to shoot her.

“I think we’ve already established that most of your problems are psychological. Statistically, this should be one too,” Andy said as she sympathetically handed me a full glass of water to wash the dumpling down to its death.

“I can’t sleep.”

“Count sheep.”

“Seriously, I haven’t slept in two days! Not one wink, not one hour, nothing, I go to bed tired, I close my eyes and nothing. I’ve just spent two nights on my back counting how many seconds I’ve been awake,” I cried as I eyed my second dumpling victim, assuring it internally that its fate would be quick and painless.

“Well that’s your problem right there. You probably spent the night thinking about how you couldn’t sleep, creating some kind of twisted neurotic escalating snowball of rapidly increasing thoughts, ergo keeping you awake. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy really.”

“Really?” I said wryly, assuming Andy would use any excuse to be able to call me a neurotic nut (whether or not there is any truth to that)…. (and there isn’t)…. (really).

“Really. So all you have to do is stop thinking. Be at one. Be zen. Find your inner self and ‘ohm it up.’”

“Ohm it up?”

“Ohm it up. You know, like the monks: oooooooohhhhmmmmmm. You know, meditate. Did you know that Buddhists and Ascetic Hindus’ ultimate goal is to separate themselves from their constant inner chatter? They want to dissociate themselves from both their mind and their body, to transcend this chaotic, meaningless, unpleasant world. When they manage to do that they attain Nirvana, a higher plane of energy where mind and body don’t exist, you simply meld in with the universe. And that’s what you have to do to sleep. You have to find inner peace.”

“But I don’t want to dissociate myself from mind and body, I like being neurotic - not in a nutty way, in a cute, charming way. I like over-thinking every situation: I like to try to figure out which of Columbo’s eyes is the glass one. I like to analyze whether the guy behind the counter at Starbucks thinks I’m cute by dissecting the way he asks which size coffee I want.”

“But you’ll never gain inner peace that way,” menaced Andy knowingly, as she sipped her green tea. I saw her then as a nagging mother who you know knows what’s best, but wish she didn’t.

I wouldn’t sleep that night, nor the next. Instead I lay awake calmly, and happily thinking about incoherent, unimportant daily meanderings. Whether Joey really did the right thing by choosing Pacey. I tried to figure out why Titanic’s Jack Dawson wouldn’t climb on the raft with Rose, and why Anna Nicole Smith has lost all her motor skills. It’s ok that I didn’t sleep for another two nights. I was happy, lost in thought, lost in what makes meaningless life events bearable: the running cynical commentary in my head. I like my mind and body as one; I don’t want to not exist. If that means I’ll never attain a higher level of spiritual being, so be it. At least I “be.” Three nights after that, I finally fell asleep, I was watching some late night A&E when I dozed off as I hopelessly tried to figure out which of Columbo’s eyes were glass.