Fred Aiken Writing

None of the other deers knew why Nigel’s antlers led them where they needed to go. All they knew as a community was that if they were going to make it as a species, then they were going to have to listen to the oration and soap boxes that came from Nigel’s antlers. 

All the other deers hated Nigel, though. They each thought that he was a dick, and whenever they as a group did not need to hang around him they typically found any and all excuses to not be anywhere near Nigel. 

No one knew exactly who mentioned it first, it was one of those things in which one deer sort of blurts out something, and the idea takes on a life of its own, but someone mentioned the possibility of taking Nigel’s antlers off of him. That was all he was good for, nothing else, and so it stood to reason that the one deer within their community that unequivocally bothered all the other deer, would need to be killed, and his antlers harvested for the survival of their community. A council of elder deers pondered on the question for many moons in the privacy of the woods, since there were many different voices to be heard.

One deer elder stated posited that each deer life was sacred, and they as a species should never want to openly try to kill one of their own. He quickly was ignored.

Another elder suggested that in order to keep their hands clean, they could simply lead Nigel to a part of the woods where they knew hunters liked to hang out, and they would let nature take its course. They would mourn Nigel’s death, and openly wonder why he had chosen to graze where hunters gathered. But then an elder pointed out that hunters liked to collect deers’ antlers as trophies, and they might never see Nigel’s antlers again if they were to be poached by hunters.

No, they decided that they would need to be the ones to kill Nigel. As gruesome as the idea was, the deer elders had no other choice if they were going to be able to collect Nigel’s antlers after he died. They each whispered into each others’ ears their ideas about how to go about killing Nigel so that no one knew specifically whose idea had been chosen, so that when it played out and Nigel was dead, and Nigel’s family asked what had happened, no one elder could come back and say specifically who it had been that had suggested how to kill Nigel.

They settled on ramming Nigel off of a cliff. It seemed to be the cleanest way to go about it, as well as the safest method to ensure that it was Nigel and only Nigel that died. And so they went about enlisting youthful, verile deers that could effectively ram Nigel down a cliff to his death. Each day they would send a young deer out with Nigel to scavenge and gather various berries and acorns and the like, all with the expressed purpose of finding a cliff and pushing Nigel to his death. 

When Nigel returned without his young companion, the elders asked what happened, to which Nigel responded that he had no idea. For some reason his antlers told him to go really fast all of a sudden, and then he noticed the young fawn running behind him to his death. He assumed the younger deer was merely suicidal, and there was nothing to be done. The same sort of incident occurred over twenty-three times before the elder deers realized they would never be able to kill Nigel. Instead, they would have to learn to live with him if they were going to utilize his antlers to guide them from danger.

I checked the internet for tips on going to sleep and staying asleep. I think that was the wrong way to go. People on the internet have some deprived minds and little filter.

It’s been four days since I’ve slept, and I can’t remember a good night’s sleep since I was fifteen. Now I’m an adult with a driver’s license, a career, mortgage, bills, serious relationships, the possibility of starting a larger family, and looking to get a promotion within the next year, and yet still I can’t figure out a way to do what not just people have been doing for thousands of years but entire species seem to do with little to no effort: get one good night’s rest.

I’m told it’s essential. In fact, I know it is. I’m running on fumes trying to figure out how to fix my brain so that it will shut up and let my body rest. My dad said to work harder, but I think that’s just because he needs someone to help around the house to do yard work and various other miscellaneous tasks that he prefers someone help him with. My mom told me to read more, and that would tire my eyes out until I drifted off to sleep. And of course my newly converted Buddhist sister said I needed to meditate on my problems, which sounds great, since the silence would be soothing, but in order for it to work I imagine that my brain would need to stay still for a second or two longer than it does.

I guess the fact that none of my family’s advice seems to be working makes me come across as a lazy, kinda illiterate person with ADHD, and maybe those things are true about me, some of my worst qualities that I don’t always like to admit to. I’m sure I can’t be the only one.

I haven’t told my wife. I sometimes watch her sleep, which sounds a lot creepier than it is. I guess spending fifteen years with someone kind of makes you their ultimate stalker. But she’s beautiful when she’s sleeping. I mean, she’s beautiful all the time, but it’s more an innocent beauty when you watch the person you love sleep. But the main reason I haven’t told her yet is because I don’t want her to worry. I know she’ll worry. It makes no sense to scare the both of us into thinking this might last forever. And then she’ll probably do her own research, which would be vastly better than mine, and she might even find a cure, or perhaps an expert in the field that would have the cure on tap, and I would finally be able to go to sleep for once. Why don’t I tell her?

It might not work, I suppose I tell myself. And then I’ve just worried my wife, she gets panic stricken, can’t sleep herself, and then we’re both in the same boat. Except the boat is capsized without a captain and we’re both drowning because we’re too far out for anyone to hear us. Or too sleep deprived to muster up the energy to swim to shore.

It’s okay, though. It’s not like I’m the first person in history to suffer from insomnia. There’s certainly plenty of literature about the subject to suggest quite a few other people go through it, and I guess that’s comforting in a small way. At least it means there might be someone out there that could tell me how to manage my sleeplessness better. If only I could hear them over the roar of the mob pulsating through the digital arena of the internet.

I went to a more reputable website that only has posts and articles from experts in the field. Individuals with phDs and doctorates and a whole host of certificates that made them sound even more impressive than they already were. The problem with scientific data, though, is that it’s oftentimes inconclusive, or at the very least it can’t tell me with absolute certainty what will help with my insomnia. It might give me some great educated hypothesis that might work. But none of the articles seem feasible, since a lot talk about various studies happening all across the country, all across the world, in which they’ve yet to be finalized, given the green stamp of approval, and commodified on the stock market for mass production. Whatever promise academia might have, it’s not nearly ready for someone in my position to take advantage of what it offers.

My last option, the only thing I have left to bank on, is to go further into the internet. The deep web is an intriguing vessel of a vast amount of data collecting through an infinite spectrum with no horizon, which perhaps is the reason why it appeared so elusive at first. But I quickly put in a handful of carefully selected key words and phrases into a data mining program that pops back up with a few solutions. It all sounds a lot more exotic than it actually is. I’m left with several thousand pages worth of information the internet has to offer, ninety percent of which is useless.

A common theme, though, of the deep web’s solution to deal with insomnia is to kill myself. I’d like to say I thought about it for a long period of time, considered all the pros and cons, but really, I just don’t think I have the energy to kill anyone, much less myself.