New Jeanland

People like to ask what you would do if you did not need sleep, and the answer is supposed to reveal something noble about you.

I would read more. I would write more. I would finally finish all of those projects I keep saying I will get to when I have time.

Those are respectable answers.

The real answer is that I would immediately create eight additional hours of obligations for myself and then complain that there still are not enough hours in the day.

I know this because I have met me. I would sit down to work on one chapter and somehow emerge four hours later with a new poem, an opinion piece about something that irritated me online, three graphics, a redesigned website category, and a completely unnecessary amount of information about some obscure historical dispute I did not know existed that morning.

At some point, there would be seventeen tabs open. One of them would be useful.

I would not remember which one.

I would tell myself I was “just researching something real quick,” which is the intellectual equivalent of saying you are only going into Target for toothpaste.

There would also be new projects. This is important. People imagine extra time as empty space. Restful space. Productive space. I apparently experience empty space as an emergency that must immediately be filled with ideas.

No sleep would not make me more organized. It would merely increase my operational capacity for nonsense.

I would write books. Build websites. Make art. Read things. Research things. Rearrange things that were perfectly fine before I touched them. Invent categories for projects that did not exist twelve minutes earlier. At some point, there would probably be a fictional government agency. Probably one devoted to cuttlefish.

After all of that, I would look at the clock, realize I had used every available minute, and say with complete sincerity: I just wish I had more time.