I'm going to claim sleep deprivation when my bills don't get paid this month

A little over a year ago I went to this wonk-ass doctor who hooked me up to wires and electrodes and a night vision camera in an effort to figure out why I couldn’t sleep. Before that process began, I started off my Quest for Sleep with my generic anti-narcotic doctor. He wasn’t really concerned with the fact that I was hallucinating spiders and bloody beating hearts on my wood floor but was terribly interested in whether or not I was a) depressed or b) depressed and contemplating offing myself. I informed him that I was neither depressed nor depressed with suicidal thoughts. I was fucking pissed and I wanted a nap.

But this time the inability to sleep cannot be blamed on my pantalones loco, my obsessive anxiety or the troll who lives under my bed and pulls my hair out at night. (Note: I’m sure my hair falls out during the day, but staying in one place for eight hours really brings home the total, gut-clenching amount that finds its way to my pillow case. So I’ve stopped blaming it on my rebellious finger-flipping body and have placed the responsibility on my friend the bed troll.) So this time, the no sleeping? Wow. I have a direct culprit that I can blame for my sleepless nights but it turns out that putting a stop to the culprit could be interpreted as animal cruelty and I’m really not a good candidate for jail.

The culprit is Lily, my mildly standoffish cat who is lithe and agile and apparently insane in her membrane. Any time I crawl into bed, day or night, sleep or nap, that bitch ass fur monster finds my antique vanity mirror simply irresistible. And you thought Robert Palmer had the market on that. No. That’s not how this works. That mirror is so irresistible it makes Charlie Sheen’s late 90’s hooker visits look like midnight charity work instead of a skank sex addiction. I’m not sure if it’s a Pavlovian response or a sadistic bend in her kittyality, but I’m about to put an end to this shit. She claws and claws and claws, scraping her paws against the mirror and making it bang against the wall, over and over and over. And over. 2am? And over. 4 am? And over. Time to get up? Here’s Lily, our favorite kitty prisoner, digging her way to freedom through my mirror. This isn’t The Shawshank Redemption. Morgan Freeman is not her best friend. She will not meet up on a Mexican beach in a romantical man reunion. I NEED TO SLEEP.