Anna Swanson
INSOMNIA MANIFESTO
We stand on the shoulders of pirate radio and the underground press. Hanky codes. Onion routers. There are words worth breaking the law for. We let in the doubts and destabilizers. We set a place at the table for the queer boner of your wet dreams.
Sleeplessness is airtime, is column inches. Your inconvenience, your suffering, your setbacks, your petty sniveling schedule. Ask us if we care. The unthinkable needs a lot of time to becomes thinkable. You’ve got all night.
All hail the anti-sleep, the great unrest. We are low-budget, self-replicating, and use what is at hand. The greasy unignited underbelly of the day gathers at your door like so many cats wanting out. And in. And out. We can go all night without a punchline.
Shoot the messenger. That’s fuel too.
We are not your conscience. Only your conscience is your conscience. We have the ethics of a doorbell, a criminal lawyer, a mirror. We do not refuse that which qualifies for our services.
And if we did? Here it is, the sleep of your dreams, a sound eight hours. Bankrolled by the day that strives always to replicate itself, to expand, to empire. This sleep comes to you fresh from a company webinar on resilience. It stores away events of the day in its dazzling and surreal filing system. Flushes chemical remnants of thought from the brain. Each small seeded doubt washed away in service of that scrubbed and dewy renewal.
We may not be friendly but one sleepless night can accomplish more than ten years of thinking it through on your coffee break.
We’ve got the intel and we’re going to share it. You’re gay. Climate change. The job is killing you. That lipstick made it look like you were trying too hard. You might be wasting your life.
Welcome to 4 am. We’ve got some literature for you.